Ludwig

Wittgenstein
Edward Kanterian
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural
figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist,
writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their
major works.

In the same series

Jean Genet James Joyce

Stephen Barber Andrew Gibson

Michel Foucault Frank Lloyd Wright

David Macey Robert McCarter

Pablo Picasso Jean-Paul Sartre

Mary Ann Caws Andrew Leak

Franz Kafka Noam Chomsky

Sander L. Gilman Wolfgang B. Sperlich

Guy Debord Jorge Luis Borges

Andy Merrifield Jason Wilson

Marcel Duchamp
Caroline Cros
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Edward Kanterian

reaktion books
Dedicated to the memory of Onnig Kanterian and Vlad Clisevici

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2007

Copyright © Edward Kanterian 2007

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Printed and bound in Great Britain

by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kanterian, Edward
Ludwig Wittgenstein. – (Critical lives)
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951
I.Title
192

isbn-13: 978 1 86189 320 8

isbn-10: 1 86189 320 5
 Contents

Introduction 7
1 Family and Early Years, 1889–1911 11
2 Cambridge, Norway and Philosophy, 1911–14 30
3 In the Trenches, 1914–18 61
4 Logic and Mysticism: The Tractatus 73
5 The Wilderness Years, 1918–29 87
6 Return to Cambridge and Philosophy, 1929–39 112
7 Professorship and Wartime, 1939–47 147
8 Nothing is Hidden: Philosophical Investigations 169
9 The Last Years, 1947–51 187
10 The Aftermath 198

References 206
Bibliography 219
Acknowledgements 223
Wittgenstein in the 1940s, photographed by his friend Ben Richards in Swansea.
 Introduction

Martin Heidegger once started a lecture on Aristotle with the words

‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died. Now let us turn to his ideas.’
He was implying that any biographical details in the life of a great
philosopher are simply irrelevant to his philosophy. All one needs
to do in order to understand a philosopher is to study his works,
his theses, theories and arguments. An opposing attitude, no less
radical, is to view the biography of a thinker as the ultimate key to
his work. Every aspect of his personality, any event in his life, any
pronouncement on a seemingly unrelated issue, be it art, politics,
morals or sex, is secretly connected to his key ideas, and whoever
wishes to understand these cannot ignore the former. We cannot
directly settle this matter in Aristotle’s case, since too little is known
about his life. But the self-sufficient substance and tremendous
influence of his works over the centuries in spite this lack of
biographical information suggest that the first attitude is more
correct than the second. Aristotle’s theoretical works can be and
have been understood without knowing much about his life.
Can the same be said of the hero of this book, Ludwig
Wittgenstein? I would suggest yes, but with an important qualifica-
tion. He was one of the founders of analytic philosophy, and his
main areas of research were theoretical and abstract: the founda-
tions of mathematics and logic, philosophy of language and mind,
and the nature of philosophy itself. True, Wittgenstein has come to
be associated with postmodernism, art, poetry, mysticism, ethics,

7
even politics. But in fact, what he wrote on these topics, from a
philosophical point of view, amounts to a tiny fragment of a huge
oeuvre. The true coordinates of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Wittgenstein’s first book, to mention one example, are not Joyce,
Schönberg or Picasso (as Terry Eagleton has claimed), but really
Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, two of the greatest logicians
and philosophers of modern times. There is thus an imbalance
between Wittgenstein’s present-day public persona and the
character of his actual work, which this book attempts to correct.
The qualification comes from the fact that Wittgenstein lived in
the modern age, the age of intellectuals, of charismatic writers,
thinkers and artists whose lives capture the collective imagination,
since they incorporate some of the deepest tensions of modernity,
and maybe even suggest some solutions to them. Wittgenstein is
of course such a charismatic intellectual figure. His lifelong concern
with religious faith, his ethical struggles and failures, his upper-class
background and his later rejection of it in favour of an almost
monkish life, his quest for love and torment with sex, his talent for
engineering and disgust for scientism, his criticism of the modern
way of life, his ambiguous relation to psychoanalysis or commu-
nism, his ultra-modernist taste in architecture and his otherwise
conservative artistic preferences – at least some of these aspects
of his personality bring him close to us. Aristotle’s life, even if we
knew its details, would simply not appeal to us in the same way.
Wittgenstein’s life, by contrast, is of great concern, indeed would be
so even if his manuscripts on language, mind, logic and mathematics
had been lost. This probably explains why Wittgenstein the
intellectual can appeal to wide audiences, even though Wittgenstein
the philosopher is little known outside academia. Wittgenstein
was born, worked, loved, searched for God, suffered and died.
This book tries to find a balance between Wittgenstein the
philosopher and Wittgenstein the intellectual, although the greater
emphasis lies on the latter. It is also the intellectual who will,

8
occasionally, be discussed from a more critical perspective. Two
chapters are dedicated to his major books, the Tractatus and the
Philosophical Investigations, but a critical discussion of his philosophy
cannot be undertaken here. The book owes much to the seminal
biographies by Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, who have under-
taken a great and ingenious effort to display the unity between
Wittgenstein’s personality and philosophy. If my approach differs
slightly in stressing some discontinuities as well, it has only been
possible through an aspect-shift that takes their biographies as
points of departure.

9
Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion
– science – and art.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1 August 1916

You want to be perfect? – Of course I want to be perfect!

Ludwig Wittgenstein to Fania Pascal
 1

Family and Early Years, 1889–1911

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was born and grew up in Vienna.

It is not surprising that one of the most important philosophers in
the modern age originated from this fabled metropolis. In the last
decades before the First World War, Vienna was at the height of its
imperial splendour, the capital of a vast and heterogeneous empire.
It was one of the main cultural centres of the world, a melting pot
of pathbreaking artistic and intellectual currents, a place where
the stiffest conservatism clashed with the most radical modernism,
where the demise of the old world and the hope for a new begin-
ning were sensed most vividly, a place rife with contradictions,
obsessions and genius. Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis
in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg atonal music, Adolf Loos functionalist
architecture, Gustav Klimt Secessionism, Arthur Schnitzler his
taboo-breaking theatre and Karl Kraus his apocalyptic satire, to
name but a few.1 It was also a place of political ‘innovation’, if we
are to count not only Theodor Herzl’s Zionism and Victor Adler’s
and Otto Bauer’s versions of socialism, but also the populist
exploitation of anti-Semitism by the mayor Karl Lueger and the
formation of Adolf Hitler’s ideology during his Viennese appren-
ticeship years. Some of the most remarkable but also darker
aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s personality can be traced back to
this fin-de-siècle world, its refined sense of culture, its strict sense of
duty, its cult of genius and tragedy, its awareness of a world in dis-
integration, and maybe to its sexual repression and anti-Semitism.

11
 The Wittgenstein family’s ancestors were Jewish. Ludwig’s
paternal great-grandfather, Moses Maier, lived in county
Wittgenstein in Germany, now part of North Rhine–Westphalia,
and was a land agent to the princely family Sayn-Wittgenstein. The
family did not have aristocratic roots, although this was rumoured
at times. Rather, Moses Maier took over the name ‘Wittgenstein’
following Napoleon’s decree that all Jews must adopt a surname.
What is certain is that Moses’s son and Ludwig’s grandfather,
Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (1802–1878), converted to
Protestantism, cut off his ties with the local Jewish community and
moved to Leipzig, where he became a successful wool merchant.
He was described as stiff and irascible, but also as determined and
very religious, viewing life as a calling to self-accomplishment. In
1838 he married Fanny Figdor (1814–1890), the daughter of a rich,
highly cultivated Viennese family, who, like him, renounced her
Jewish faith and converted. The break with Judaism seems to have
been so complete that Hermann Christian forbade his children to
marry Jews. Indeed, he seems even to have been known as an anti-
Semite, a state of mind that was not rare among converted Jews at
the time. When they moved from Leipzig to Vienna in the 1850s
the Wittgensteins did not participate in the Jewish community,
but gave their children a thorough Germanic education. Through
Fanny’s family the Wittgensteins maintained close connections
to the Viennese cultural and artistic elite. They were known as art
collectors and as patrons of music. The famous violinist Joseph
Joachim was adopted by Fanny and Hermann at a young age and
sent to Leipzig to study with Felix Mendelssohn. Johannes Brahms
was among numerous famous friends, giving piano lessons to the
Wittgenstein daughters. The playwrights Franz Grillparzer and
Christian Friedrich Hebbel were two other such illustrious friends.
This privileged education and cultural exposure contrasted with
the otherwise frugal regime that the children were deliberately
brought up in.

12
The Wittgenstein
family house,
the ‘Palais
Wittgenstein’
in Vienna.

Out of the ten children of the couple, Karl (1847–1913), Ludwig’s

father, was the most remarkable. He was rebellious, highly intelli-
gent, good-looking, self-confident, impatient (especially with
things he considered a waste of time, such as philosophy), at times
frightening. In her unpublished memoirs his daughter Margarete
writes that she had almost only sombre memories about her child-
hood. ‘I did not deem the often irradiating gaiety of my father
funny, but frightening.’2 Karl was also practically minded and
determined to make his own way – if necessary, against his father’s
or anybody else’s wishes. As a teenager he ran away from home
twice, the second time just after he had been expelled from school
for denying the immortality of the soul in an essay. He ended up in

13
New York, where he worked as a waiter, violinist and teacher of
music, mathematics and other subjects, finally returning home
after two years with some money earned by himself and an invalu-
able experience of the New World. In later years he repeatedly
praised the free market system in newspaper articles, while the
Socialist press criticized his aggressive business methods, denoun-
cing him as an ‘American’. He studied engineering and worked first
as a draughtsman in the railways, then in the construction of ships
and turbines. At 27 he was the managing director of a Viennese
company and from then it took him only two decades to become a
steel magnate, heading several companies and turning into one of
the wealthiest industrialists in Europe, much like Andrew Carnegie
in America, whom he in fact befriended. Indeed, the family had the
byname the ‘Carnegies’ of Central Europe before the war. At the
age of 52 Karl Wittgenstein suddenly retired from business and
transferred most of his fortune into us equities, which would make
his family even richer with the onset of the economic depression
following the First World War, and devoted his time to his family,
to art and to writing sharp-witted political and economic articles
for various periodicals. Although he refused the offer of being
ennobled by adding a ‘von’ to his name (as this would have
betrayed the parvenu), he lived in Vienna with his family in an
aristocratic mansion, known as ‘Palais Wittgenstein’, built in the
nineteenth century by a Hungarian count, and also possessed a
house in Neuwaldegg on the outskirts of the capital, where Ludwig
was born. In the summer the family would retreat to the Hochreit,
Karl’s country estate and hunting lodge in the mountains. As a
patron of the arts he showed sensitivity for innovative develop-
ments, funding, for instance, the famous Sezession building,
befriending the first president of the Vienna Secession group,
Gustav Klimt, and generally surrounding himself and his family
with the crème de la crème of the Viennese elite. ‘The minister of fine
art’, as Klimt called Karl, acquired a large collection of art pieces,

14
Wittgenstein’s
parents. His father
was a leading
industrialist,
his mother an
accomplished
pianist.

by Klimt himself, by Rodin, Max Klinger and others. Besides the

grand old man Brahms, musicians such as Bruno Walter, Clara
Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Josef Labor and Pablo Casals were also
close to the family.
Karl had eight children with his wife Leopoldine Kalmus
(1850–1926), whose parents both came from prominent Catholic
families. Her father, however, had Jewish ancestors and so three
of Ludwig’s grandparents had Jewish ancestry. In conformity with
their mother’s denomination, Ludwig and his siblings were bap-
tized into the Catholic faith, but there seems to have been little
churchgoing in the family. Although fully devoted, indeed sub-
servient to her husband, Leopoldine’s relations with her children
were not the warmest and they were, typically for a family of this
social status, surrounded by nursemaids and private teachers most
of the time. But there was one exception to this, and that was

15
music. Leopoldine was an extremely gifted pianist and devoted
much time to the musical education of her children. She was also
a merciless critic. Often after a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic a
large circle of music experts would gather in the Palais Wittgenstein
and analyse the performance, with Leopoldine dominating such
occasions, perhaps not unlike Ludwig many years later in
Cambridge’s philosophy circles. She was considered such a good
pianist that some liked her playing better than that of her son
Paul, the celebrated concert pianist. Most of her children were
musically very talented and active, but her two sons Hans and Paul
were exceptional. Hans was a pianist of genius, who gave public
performances even as a child.

A story [Ludwig] told in later life concerned an occasion when

he was woken at three in the morning by the sound of a piano.
He went downstairs to find Hans performing one of his own
compositions. Hans’s concentration was manic. He was sweat-
ing, totally absorbed, and completely oblivious of Ludwig’s
presence. The image remained for Ludwig a paradigm for what
it was like to be possessed of genius.3

But his father was unmoved by this talent and had decided that
his son should follow a business career. The conflict between the
duty felt towards his father and his own calling caused severe
tensions in Hans. Eventually, he ran away from home and ended
up in the United States. He vanished from a boat at the age of 26
in Chesapeake Bay, an event that was interpreted as suicide.
Of Karl’s five sons, two more, Rudolf and Kurt, committed
suicide and Ludwig too would contemplate suicide throughout his
life. Such events suggest that, despite all its cultural sophistication,
there was something tragic, ruptured and morbid about this family,
a good illustration of the thesis Tiefenpsychologie that Freud devel-
oped in Vienna, not by coincidence. As Brian McGuinness once

16
Wittgenstein with his brother Paul and sisters.

put it, the family history ‘contains many anecdotes that may have
figured in the appendices to a treatise on psycho-analysis’.4 Rudolf,
whose greatest interests were literature and theatre, was psycholog-
ically unstable. He suffered from the thought that he was a homo-
sexual (a ‘perverted disposition’, as he described it in his farewell
letter) and when he seemed to be unable to cope with his life in
Berlin he ended it. He walked into a pub, ordered drinks, asked
the pianist to play the song ‘I am lost’ and poisoned himself on the
spot. He too had come into conflict with his father’s expectations.
Although the same is not true of Kurt, who killed himself because
his soldiers deserted him while he was serving as an officer in the
army on the Italian front in 1918, all these suicides betray an almost
unbearable sense of duty, be it towards themselves or towards the
overpowering father figure – a sense of duty that would sooner or
later crush them.
Since the daughters did not experience the same kind of pressure
from their father, their lives followed a more balanced pattern.
Hermine organized musical evenings, helped her father in acquiring

17
 Gustav Klimt,
Margarete Stonborough-
Wittgenstein, 1905, oil
on canvas. Margarete
was one of
Wittgenstein’s sisters.

his extensive picture collection and writing his autobiography,

and later managed a day-care centre for children. She wrote a book
about the family (Recollections) that contains insightful portraits
and numerous fascinating anecdotes. She never married, but was

18
considered the most harmonious person in the family. Helene did
marry. She had great musical talents, but did not use them profes-
sionally. She also had a sense of humour that Ludwig could relate
to, since she liked to play nonsensical games with language, which
led to many funny exchanges with her philosopher brother, who
was later to say that one could write a good philosophical book
consisting entirely of jokes. But his closest affinity was with his
youngest sister, Margarete (‘Gretl’), a beautiful woman with a
strong personality, sharp, critical intellect, a predilection for artistic
innovation and passion for new ideas such as psychoanalysis.
She was to become a friend of Sigmund Freud, who psycho-
analysed her and whom she helped to flee the Nazis. Margarete
exercised a great intellectual and artistic influence on her brother
Ludwig. As Hermine wrote about her:

Already in her youth her room was the embodied rebellion

against anything traditional and the opposite of a typical young
woman’s room, as mine was for a long time. God knows where
she found all those interesting objects with which she decorated
her room. She was brimming with ideas and, most important,
she could achieve what she wanted and she knew what she
wanted.5

She married a wealthy American in 1905, Jerome Stonborough, and

Klimt was commissioned to draw her wedding portrait, a painting
that is now one of his most famous.
As a result of the tragic deaths of Hans and Rudolf, the younger
sons Paul and Ludwig were treated differently. Paul, two years
older than Ludwig, received a classical education and was allowed
to pursue a career as a concert pianist and piano teacher. This
career was tragically blighted when he lost his right arm in the First
World War. Nevertheless, having a strong will, like so many of his
relatives, he did not give up and learned to play with his left hand

19
alone. He even commissioned special works from composers such
as Richard Strauss, Sergej Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten and espe-
cially Maurice Ravel, who wrote the famous Concerto for the Left
Hand (1932) for Paul. Here is what Ludwig told Maurice Drury
about Paul in 1935:

[Wittgenstein] said that his brother had the most amazing

knowledge of music. On one occasion some friends played a
few bars of music from any one of a number of composers,
from widely different periods, and his brother was able without
a mistake to say who the composer was and from which work
it was taken. On the other hand he did not like his brother’s
interpretation of music. Once when his brother was practising
the piano and Wittgenstein was in another room of the house,
the music suddenly stopped and his brother burst into the
room saying: ‘I can’t play when you are in the house. I feel
your scepticism seeping under the door.’6

The youngest of the eight children, Ludwig Wittgenstein was

born on 26 April 1889 (within days of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf
Hitler and in the same year as Martin Heidegger). He was a delicate
and sensitive child who was in constant need of protection. After
receiving private tuition up to the age of 14, he was sent in 1903 to a
Realschule in Linz specializing in scientific and technical education,
a school of a lesser standard than the one Paul was sent to and
where most of whose pupils were drawn from the working class.
This school has achieved some notoriety because it was also attended
by Adolf Hitler in the years 1900–04. Wittgenstein and Hitler were
therefore at the same school for one year. Although born in the
same year, Hitler attended school two years below Wittgenstein.
We have no evidence that they talked to each other, an unlikely
event given that both were loners, but it is not impossible that they
knew each other, or at least that one knew of the other. Hitler

20
The young
Wittgenstein on
a rocking-horse,
1891.

writes in Mein Kampf that there was a Jewish boy at his school who
was not much to be trusted and of whom Hitler thought little.
Much has been made of this passage by an interpreter who claims
that Wittgenstein was the boy mentioned by Hitler and that we can
see them together in a class photo.7 Moreover, Hitler was suppos-
edly even influenced in his anti-Semitism by the awkward behav-
iour of his schoolmate Wittgenstein. The first claim is simply false
(the boy supposedly identified as Wittgenstein in the photo is not
him) and the second unconvincing speculation. If aspects of Hitler’s
ideology have their roots at this school, then they are more likely to
be found in what the history teacher Leopold Pötsch taught Hitler,
namely that the traditional patriotism for the Austro-Hungarian
empire was obsolete and that the emerging pan-Germanic nation-
alism should be embraced instead.8 The foundations of Hitler’s
anti-Semitism were not laid in Linz, but much more likely in
Vienna, a city in which Austro-German xenophobia and especially

21
anti-Semitism was rife, particularly during the long service of the
populist mayor Karl Lueger (1897–1910), much admired by Hitler.9
With his reclusive character and his elitist background Ludwig
did not adapt well to the new environment. He was later to describe
his three years at the school as a painful experience, which would
have been beset with total loneliness and alienation had it not been
for the son of his host family with whom he developed a close
friendship. As Hermine was later told by one of Ludwig’s former
classmates, he had appeared to them ‘as if blown from an alien
world. He had a completely different life-style from theirs, addressing
his school-fellows . . . with the formal pronoun “Sie”; which created
a barrier.’ He read different books and appeared more mature
and serious than them. ‘Above all he was uncommonly sensitive,
and I can imagine that to him his school-fellows in turn seemed
to stem from another world, from a terrible one!’10 They paid him
back by ridiculing him with jingles such as ‘Wittgenstein wends
his woeful windy way towards Vienna’.11 His performance at school
was mediocre. He did well only in English and Conduct, and in
Religion, where he scored the highest mark. Ironically it was in
these years that he lost the naïve religious faith of his childhood,
especially through conversations with Margarete. Nevertheless,
questions of religious faith were to concern him for the rest of his
life, if only rarely from a philosophical point of view.
Part of the reason that Ludwig was sent to this school was that,
unlike his older brothers, he did not rebel against his father,
although he would have been in the best position to get away with
it. Instead, he seems to have manifested a concern with how he
appeared in the eyes of others and thus a tendency to please every-
body. At least this is how he perceived himself much later in a
written confession addressed to his family:

As far as my memory goes I was an affectionate child but at the

same time of weak character. Very early in life I recognised the

22
Wittgenstein as a
teenager.

greater strength of character of my brother Paul. When he had

been slightly sick and was recovering and was asked whether he
would like to get up now or would prefer to stay longer in bed,
he would calmly say that he would rather stay lying down;
whereas I in the same circumstances said what was untrue
(that I wanted to get up) because I was afraid of the bad opinion
of those around me.12

There may be some truth in this self-description. But we should

bear in mind that it is written by a merciless prosecutor, an author
who, like Augustine in his Confessions, excelled in self-accusations
and agonized endlessly over his real and perceived sins. This

23
 An engineering
diagram drawn
by the young
Wittgenstein.

extreme concern with one’s moral status can be seen as partly

inherited from the family, if we remember the troubled souls of
his brothers Hans and Rudolf, and the sense of duty present in
the family. But only partly. Not every moral trait is inherited, and
exemplary figures such as Augustine or Wittgenstein are cases in
their own class who do not just embody typical moral problems,
but also deepen human morality and offer new ways of under-
standing it.
What is certain, however, is that Ludwig’s cultural formation
was to a large extent determined by his upbringing. As part of the
Austro-German education received by the whole family, the boy

24
was taught the canon of classic German literature, that is, Goethe,
Schiller, Lessing, Mörike, authors he would admire for the rest of
his life. He was also very fond of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, which
he would quote in his diaries, and of Schopenhauer and Gottfried
Keller. His literary taste could be described as conservative. He
became familiar with the works of nineteenth-century writers such
as Johann Nestroy, Grillparzer and Nikolaus Lenau, and, also,
largely through Margarete’s influence, with Freud’s progressive
ideas and Karl Kraus’s scathing and stylistically brilliant criticism
of moral, intellectual and linguistic decadence. But he never
warmed to the authors of his own generation. The most modern
writers he admired were Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche. All he had to say about Kafka was that this was some-
body who gave ‘himself a great deal of trouble not writing about
his trouble’.13 He did read Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and
Georg Trakl, and he did acknowledge genius where he sensed it
(for instance in Trakl), but none of these became favourites.
The same holds for his musical orientation. Although the period
of his youth was a time of great innovation in music, especially
in Vienna, where the Second Viennese School around Arnold
Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern developed twelve-tone
music, Wittgenstein’s taste remained more traditional. This was
not because he had no understanding of music. Although he did
not learn to play any instrument in his childhood, he was, like the
rest of his family, musically very gifted and could whistle whole
scores with great accuracy. As an adult he taught himself the
clarinet. Wittgenstein simply detested contemporary music. Even
a composer like Gustav Mahler was too modern and corrupted for
him, and he would enter violent arguments with anybody who
thought otherwise.14 His heroes were Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert, Brahms and Labor (the latter was patronized by Ludwig’s
father). An exception regarding Wittgenstein’s anti-modernist
tastes was architecture, about which more will be said later.

25
 There is one further contemporary influence that needs to be
mentioned in this context, and it is one of darker provenance:
Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903). It is difficult for us
today to understand the fascination this misogynistic, racist and
reactionary book exercised, not only on young Wittgenstein but
on a whole generation. Weininger (1880–1903) was a tormented
homosexual and anti-Semitic young Jew who at the age of 23, only
half a year after his book was published (and half a year before
Rudolf Wittgenstein killed himself in a similarly theatrical man-
ner), committed suicide in the house in which Beethoven had died
in Vienna. This suicide made Weininger immediately famous, and
his book became a bestseller, reaching thirteen reprints within four
years. The book pretends to give a complete anthropology, a solution
to all moral problems and an intransigent critique of modernity.
Humans are bipolar beings, torn apart between the pursuit for
higher ideals, such as truth and love, and mere animal instincts
such as sexuality. Love and sex are thus mutually exclusive. The
first corresponds to the Platonic form of ‘Man’, the second to that
of ‘Woman’. All humans are mixtures of these two forms and thus
bisexual, but actual women embody ‘Woman’ to a much larger
degree. Women are therefore akin to animals, entirely concerned
with the ‘main’ aspects of sexuality, procreation and motherhood.
Men are concerned with much more spiritual things, for example,
politics, philosophy, art. Only they possess rationality, morality
and free will, whereas women are immoral and herd animals. Jews
are entirely female (‘the most manly Jew is more feminine than the
least manly Aryan’)15 and thus entirely depraved.
As Ray Monk explains, it could not be Weininger’s anti-Semitism
or ‘theory’ of women that attracted Wittgenstein.16 Later in life
he actually said about this ‘theory’: ‘How wrong [Weininger] was,
my God he was wrong.’17 It was rather Weininger’s views on men
and modernity, and the more general ethical questions Weininger
raised (as Wittgenstein tried to explain later to his puzzled

26
The Austrian
writer Otto
Weininger, an
influence on
Wittgenstein.

Cambridge friends). The modern age is an age of depravity and

decay, of the masses, of materialism, science, communism and
capitalism. It is an age of the disappearance of the spirit, of morality,
art and genius. The only way to reverse this is open to men, to a
few men, who rise above mediocrity, aspire to realize the divine
in themselves and acquire genius. This could only be achieved
through real love:

If we now turn to the gifted, we shall see that in their case love
frequently begins with self-mortification, humiliation, and

27
Wittgenstein and his friend Eccles experimenting with a kite on the moors near
Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1908.

restraint. A moral change sets in, a process of purification

seems to emanate from the object loved.18

We find aspects of Weininger’s Kulturkritik in other writers

Wittgenstein read, such as Nietzsche and Kraus. But none offered
so radical a choice as Weininger, namely that between genius and
death. Weininger’s own suicide can be seen as the logical conse-
quence of this, once he realized that he could not, by his own
nature, become a genius. This insistence on the duties to oneself,
on radical honesty and the obsession with suicide as the ultimate
conclusion in the face of failure is something we find Wittgenstein
preoccupied with from 1903 to 1912 – the time he entered school in
Linz to his realization in Cambridge that he was capable of some-
thing original after all, namely original work in philosophy.
After he finished school in the summer of 1906 he went to
Berlin to study mechanical engineering, a course to the liking of his

28
father and one from which he graduated successfully in 1908. In
Berlin he went numerous times to the opera, 30 times alone to hear
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, if we are to believe him. It was also the
time in which he started writing a diary, ‘thoughts about myself on
slips of paper’, as he wrote in retrospect.

It was an important step for me. Later it came partly from an

impulse to imitate (I had read Keller’s diaries) and partly from
the need to preserve something of myself. So it was in large part
vanity. But it was also a substitute for a person in whom I could
confide.19

In Berlin Wittgenstein became interested in aeronautics and

after graduation, in 1908, he went to the University of Manchester to
study this nascent field. He continued his research there for another
three years, experimenting for a while with self-made kites at a
meteorological observation station near Glossop, where he met
William Eccles, an engineer with whom he stayed friends for three
decades. Back in Manchester he began to design a jet-reaction
propeller, whose engine he patented in 1911 and for which he
earned a research studentship from the university. Clearly, he was
showing talent and innovation. But by then engineering proved to
be a dead end, given that his interest in philosophy had become
overwhelming.

29
 2

Cambridge, Norway and

Philosophy, 1911–14

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when Wittgenstein became interested

in philosophy. His interest in the general ethical questions such
as those posed by Weininger occurred early on. He also read
Schopenhauer in his early years. Schopenhauer stressed that life
was futile and full of suffering, which could be overcome by art and
especially by music, and his idealism must have appealed to the
cultivated and lonesome teenager. But we also know that towards
the end of his school days Wittgenstein considered studying with
Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna. Boltzmann was a prominent physicist
who had invented statistical mechanics, but who was also known
for his lectures on the philosophy of physics, some of which were
published in his Popular Writings in 1905 and which Wittgenstein
read. He also read the introduction to Heinrich Hertz’s famous
Principles of Mechanics (1894). Both Boltzmann and Hertz operated
within a broadly Kantian framework, according to which science is
a model constructed by the human mind that does not refer to or
describe reality, but rather is used to organize empirical data in one
among several possible ways. As Hertz argued, when we encounter
a problem about a particular theoretical term, such as ‘force’, we
should not ask whether something corresponds to this term in
reality, but reformulate our scientific theory without using the
term. (This came later to be known as ‘instrumentalism’ in the
philosophy of science.) Hertz wrote: ‘the question as to the nature
of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer

30
vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions’.1 Wittgenstein knew
passages such as this by heart and they became relevant for his
own philosophy.
In any case, such readings show that by the time he went to
Berlin his interests covered questions of a more theoretical nature
than those related to engineering. In Berlin or very soon afterwards
they must have turned into a calling. As Hermine wrote in her
memoirs:

At this period or a little later he was suddenly gripped by

philosophy . . . so violently and so much against his will that
he suffered severely from the twofold and conflicting inner
vocation and seemed to himself to be torn in two. One of the
many transformations he was to go through in his life had
come over him and shook him to the depths of his being.2

Although it may be more appropriate to speak of a gradual process

that eventually precipitated than of a sudden conversion to philoso-
phy, this crisis was certainly genuine and only reinforced by the
fact that his interest in philosophy also conflicted with the father’s
hope that at least one of the sons should do something meaningful.
In Manchester, and partly through his studies in aeronautics,
Wittgenstein became interested in higher mathematics, attending
E. J. Littlewood’s lectures on the theory of mathematical analysis,
and eventually in the foundations of mathematics. The foundations
of mathematics was a field that, after a long period of neglect, had
begun to receive great attention in the nineteenth century, particu-
larly through the works of George Boole, Georg Cantor, Richard
Dedekind, Gottlob Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Karl Weierstrass and
others, and was still very much at the fore in the early twentieth
century. At stake was the justification of mathematics as a scientific
discipline. In particular, Gottlob Frege’s (1848–1925) contribution
to this debate, although neglected in his lifetime, turned out in

31
Part of a page from the German edition of Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic.

retrospect as the most pivotal, since his own answer to the founda-
tional question led to the greatest revolution in logic since Aristotle.
Frege’s own theory of mathematics, so-called logicism, involved the
idea that all truths of arithmetic are deducible from a few purely
logical truths, which themselves are self-evident, indubitable and
independent of the human mind. Logicism also involved the claim
that numbers are genuine objects, although not physical or mental,
but abstract ones, situated in a ‘Third Realm’. Consequently, state-
ments about numbers, for example, ‘1 + 2 = 3’, are not statements
about physical or mental objects such as a collection of apples on a
table or of mental ideas in our mind or brain, but statements about
certain abstract objects. In any case, in order to prove that arith-
metic is deducible from logical laws alone, Frege devised an ideal
language and a formal logical calculus much more powerful than
the Aristotelian syllogistic available hitherto. He presented this
logic in his Concept Script (1879), argued for his logicism in the
Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and finally came to develop it fully
in his two-volume masterwork Basic Laws of Arithmetic (vol. i, 1893,
vol. ii, 1903). Both the propositional logic and the predicate logic

32
The philosopher
and mathematician
Gottlob Frege, a
major influence on
Wittgenstein.

taught at universities today go back to Frege’s innovations. His

reflections on language, which he published in several articles, are
equally important and are considered classics in philosophy of lan-
guage. Frege thought that our natural language, ‘the language of
the marketplace’, as he called it, is vague, imprecise and misleading,
and therefore not apt to articulate the logicist programme. Only
the ideal language he developed to support his logical calculus
could do that. Wittgenstein was to be deeply influenced by and
take issue with many of Frege’s claims.
A programme similar to Frege’s was pursued in England by
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), in The Principles of Mathematics

33
(1903) and later in Principia Mathematica (1910–13), co-authored
with Alfred North Whitehead. In his famous article ‘On Denoting’
(1905) Russell argued that natural language is misleading and that
its structure can be understood only by means of logical analysis.
Thus he claimed that a sentence like ‘The present king of France is
bald’ only appears to be an ordinary subject-predicate sentence,
whereas in reality it is a much more complicated sentence. Russell
thought that we can apply logic to ordinary sentences to unveil
their real structure, in this way solving any problems that might
arise from troublesome terms. The troublesome term here is ‘The
present king of France’, which according to Russell must be viewed
as meaningless, if it is taken as the grammatical subject, since there
is no present king of France. And if a component of a sentence is
meaningless, then the sentence itself must be meaningless. Thus it
would seem that we must conclude from the meaninglessness of
‘The present king of France’ to the meaninglessness of ‘The present
king of France is bald’! But of course, the sentence ‘The present king
of France is bald’ is not meaningless. We all understand it. Russell
solved this problem by claiming that the sentence actually means
‘There is one and only one king of France and he is bald’ and that
this is its actual, if more complicated form (which in the notation of
mathematical logic looks even more complicated). Here the trouble-
some term ‘the present king of France’ does not even occur and thus
the problem this term posed does not arise anymore. This ingen-
ious argument has some similarity to the way Hertz treated the
term ‘force’, as just seen. With Russell’s article the paradigm of
philosophical analysis, which was to dominate much of twentieth-
century Anglophone philosophy, was born. In his early period
Wittgenstein accepted this paradigm, that is, that we can understand
the real structure of our language only through logical analysis,
and he came to reject it only much later (see chapter Eight).
Wittgenstein came across the works of Frege and Russell in
Manchester for the first time and started very soon to come up

34
Bertrand Russell
in 1918.

with solutions to various related questions. Russell had shown that

Frege’s system, as developed in his Basic Laws of Arithmetic, con-
tained a disastrous flaw, since it was possible to derive a straight-
forward paradox from Frege’s basic assumptions. For one could
derive the existence of a set of all those sets that do not contain
themselves as a member. What are we to say about this set then?
Does it contain itself or not? If it contains itself, then it does not
meet the initial requirement and thus it is not part of itself, that is,
it does not contain itself. If, however, it does not contain itself, then
it meets the initial requirement and thus it does contain itself. And
so on. This set theoretic paradox plunged Frege into despair and he
tried, unsuccessfully, to mend his system.3 Russell’s own solution to
this problem involved the presupposition that there are infinitely
many objects in the world (this is the so-called axiom of infinity),
but Wittgenstein found this presupposition dubious as soon as he
started thinking about this problem. As he was to say later, ‘Logic

35
Part of a page from Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica.

must take care of itself ’. It is an a priori discipline and it cannot

rely on any assumptions about the world, even about the number
of objects. Indeed, logic does not make a claim about anything.
It does not have a subject matter – a contention standing in stark
contrast to the beliefs of Frege ansd Russell that logic describes
the relations between ‘logical objects’ in a Platonistic ‘Third Realm’
(Frege) or the most general features of the universe (Russell). The
truths of logic are tautologies, for example, ‘Either it is raining or
it is not raining’, and they are always true, but vacuously so. For to
know that it is either raining or it is not raining is not to know
anything about the world. These ideas, which came very early to
Wittgenstein, were later incorporated into the Tractatus and they
belong to the most significant aspects of his early philosophy.
Wittgenstein did not accept Russell’s solution of the set theoretic
paradox. In April 1909, at the age of 20, he wrote to the mathemat-
ician Philip Jourdain, Russell’s friend, proposing his own solution
to the paradox.4 Jourdain, after consulting Russell, rejected this
solution, but Wittgenstein did not give up. He wrote to Frege and
visited him in Jena in 1911. It was an eye-opening experience.

36
 I was shown into Frege’s study. Frege was a small, neat man with
a pointed beard who bounced around the room as he talked.
He absolutely wiped the floor with me, and I felt very depressed;
but at the end he said ‘You must come again’, so I cheered up.
I had several discussions with him after that. Frege would never
talk about anything but logic and mathematics, if I started on
some other subject, he would say something polite and then
plunge back into logic and mathematics. He once showed me
an obituary on a colleague, who, it was said, never used a word
without knowing what it meant; he expressed astonishment
that a man should be praised for this!’5

Wittgenstein wanted to study with Frege, but Frege suggested that

it would be better for the young man to go to Cambridge and work
with Russell. Wittgenstein followed his advice. Although he was still
a student in Manchester, he travelled to Cambridge in October 1911,
went unannounced to the rooms of the famous philosopher and
introduced himself. He started attending Russell’s lectures,
sometimes dominating them, after which he would follow Russell to
his rooms and involve the latter in intense philosophical discussions
till late at night. Initially, Russell seems to have been slightly irritated
by his new student, as we can gather from his daily letters to his
lover Lady Ottoline Morrell. Just one day after the initial meeting
Russell wrote: ‘My German friend threatens to be an infliction.’ A
few days later: ‘My German, who seems to be rather good, was very
argumentative.’ Then again: ‘My German engineer, I think, is a fool.
He thinks nothing empirical is knowable – I asked him to admit that
there was no rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t.’ It may be
easy to make fun of this exchange, as Russell seems to have done,
but it does show that Wittgenstein came with his own philosophical
views to Cambridge and was eager to defend them.6
At the end of Michaelmas term Wittgenstein wanted to know
whether it made sense for him to continue philosophy and thus

37
resolve the vocational crisis he had been in since he left school.
He asked Russell for advice and Russell told him to give him some
written work first. The essay Wittgenstein produced over the vaca-
tion much impressed Russell. As he wrote to Lady Ottoline, he
thought it was ‘very good, much better than my English pupils do.
I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things.’
He advised him to continue with philosophy, an encouragement
that Wittgenstein perceived as his salvation, ending the uncertainty
about his direction in life. On 1 February 1912 he was admitted as
an undergraduate at Trinity College, with Russell as his supervisor.
But this was no ordinary student. At the end of the term Russell
realized that he had taught his pupil everything he himself knew
and that Wittgenstein was ‘the young man one hopes for’, who
could solve the great philosophical problems Russell himself felt
too exhausted to tackle after completing his masterwork Principia
Mathematica.

W. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy

than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs.
He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it
makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive
and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with
hope, and every evening he ends in despair.7

When Hermine Wittgenstein visited her brother in Cambridge at

the end of Trinity term Russell told her that ‘We expect the next big
step in philosophy to be taken by your brother’, which came as
something of a shock to her, since her brother had not been regarded
as anything out of the ordinary in their family hitherto. She also
noticed how much happier Ludwig seemed to be in Cambridge.
Even decades later, when Russell had come to be critical of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, he would write in his Autobiography
that Wittgenstein was ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have

38
ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, pro-
found, intense, and dominating’.8 Russell and Wittgenstein were
soon discussing philosophy as equals. As mentioned, Wittgenstein’s
initial interest had been in the philosophy of mathematics and the
solution to Russell’s Paradox. But in Cambridge he began to think
about more questions, namely the nature of logic itself, its subject
matter, the status of logical truths, the relation between logic and
fundamental language. These questions were to preoccupy him
for several years and he presented his answers in the Tractatus,
completed in 1918.
Like Vienna, Cambridge before the First World War was a place
of many renowned academics and intellectuals, and one could have
expected Wittgenstein to fit well in this context. Given his depres-
sive nature, this was only partly the case. But it was certainly help-
ful for Wittgenstein to be able to exchange with other high-calibre
minds. Apart from Russell he became acquainted with leading
figures such as the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the logician W. E.
Johnson, and the philosophers Whitehead, J. E. McTaggart, George
Edward Moore, and the great economist John Maynard Keynes.
Whitehead and McTaggart did not have a favourable impression
of the young philosopher. Johnson was initially appointed as
Wittgenstein’s personal tutor, but this arrangement was terminated
after a few weeks, since Johnson was estranged by the student’s
patronizing behaviour. Nevertheless, they stayed on friendly terms.
Over time, Wittgenstein also became friends with Moore and
Keynes. Moore (1873–1958) had already published his most impor-
tant contributions to the nascent current of analytic philosophy,
in particular his book Principia Ethica (1903). Wittgenstein did
not think too highly of Moore as a philosopher, but he admired
Moore’s sincerity and truthfulness. Keynes (1883–1946), who at the
time was working on the theory of probability and was influenced
by Russell and Moore, was fascinated by Wittgenstein as soon as
they met. He was certainly Wittgenstein’s intellectual match, quick,

39
sharp, original and open to new ideas, and in his first years in
Cambridge Wittgenstein spent countless hours in discussions with
him. Keynes was also to become one of Wittgenstein’s protectors
on a more practical level, helping him when he became a prisoner
of war in 1918, bringing him back to Cambridge in 1929 and finally
lobbying for his professorship in 1939.
It was partly due to Keynes’s support that Wittgenstein was
made a member of the Apostles in November 1912. This was a
select debating society founded in the nineteenth century, which
was presently led by Keynes and the writer Lytton Strachey, and
somebody like Wittgenstein was just the kind of member they were
after. Around the turn of the century some of the most famous
British intellectuals and writers were its members, including the
Bloomsbury generation. The Apostles adopted Wittgenstein as an
‘embryo’, which was the first step towards full membership. Russell
was opposed to this adoption, arguing that the ‘embryo’ would not
like their intellectual and homoerotic self-affectation. And, indeed,
Wittgenstein was disgusted by the society and left it after only one
term. The one thing the Apostles were not, he said, was apostolic.
A sample of the pretentious tone among the Apostles is given by
the following passage from a letter by Strachey to Keynes, dated
17 May 1912:

Oliver and Herr Sinckel-Winckel [Wittgenstein] hard at it on

universals and particulars. The latter oh! so bright – but quelle
souffrance! Oh God! God! ‘If a loves b’ – ‘There may be a com-
mon quality’ – ‘Not analysable that way at all, but the complexes
have certain qualities.’ How shall I manage to slink off to bed?9

More committed was Wittgenstein’s participation in the meetings

of the Moral Science Club, the university’s philosophy society.
With Moore’s help he even changed the rules of the society to
improve the quality of the discussions, establishing a chairman to

40
A group photograph of the Cambridge University Moral Science Club, c. 1913.

keep the debating on target and stipulating that no paper should

be longer than seven minutes. In December he gave his first philo-
sophical talk, on the question ‘What is Philosophy?’, which lasted
just four minutes, beating the previous record by two minutes.
In this talk he argued that philosophy is the totality of all proposi-
tions that are taken as unprovable and basic in science.
Wittgenstein’s closest personal friend was, however, not an
established don, but a young man he met through Russell in 1912,
David Pinsent, a brilliant undergraduate in mathematics (and
descendant of David Hume). Pinsent assisted Wittgenstein in cer-
tain experiments involving the role of rhythm in the appreciation of
music at the psychological laboratory, a topic Wittgenstein became
interested in upon meeting the experimental psychologist C. S.
Myers. These experiments showed that under certain conditions
subjects are prone to hear a rhythm in a sequence of beats that is
not really there. It appears that Wittgenstein gave a paper on this
topic at the British Psychological Association in Cambridge in 1912.
Whether he intended this work to have any philosophical signifi-
cance is not certain. It may have been the parallel between music

41
 Wittgenstein’s
friend David
Pinsent, to whom
the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus was
to be dedicated,
seen here in
Norway on a trip
with Wittgenstein.

and language to which Wittgenstein was drawn, as McGuinness

suggests.10 But it may have also been mere curiosity for a phenom-
enon that had both a scientific and an aesthetic aspect and thus fit-
ted with Wittgenstein’s general interests. In any case, it was through
these experiments and the love for music that he found an intimate
friend in Pinsent. In character very different from Wittgenstein,
enthusiastic, unaffected, not easily disturbed, Pinsent proved the
ideal companion until his untimely death in 1918. Wittgenstein
called him ‘my first and only friend’ and dedicated the Tractatus
to him. They spent much time together, going to concerts, playing
music, even going on trips to Iceland and Norway. Pinsent kept a
diary covering his friendship with Wittgenstein, which contains
much invaluable information about young Ludwig.

42
 Wittgenstein soon confided in Pinsent as in no one else before,
telling him about the loneliness and suicidal thoughts he had
experienced since leaving his parents’ home in 1903, thoughts from
which he was relieved only in Cambridge. The two friends also had
many conversations about philosophy. In May 1912 Pinsent wrote
in his diary: ‘he is reading philosophy . . . but has only just started
systematic reading: and he expresses the most naïve surprise that
all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all
stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes!’11 A year later,
in August 1913, Pinsent notes:

he explained to me his latest discoveries in logic. They are truly

amazing and have solved all the problems on which he has been
working unsatisfactorily for the last year. . . . Of course he has
upset a lot of Russell’s work – but Russell would be the last to
resent that, and really the greatness of his work suffers little
thereby – as it is obvious that Wittgenstein is one of Russell’s
disciples and owes enormously to him. But Wittgenstein’s work
is really amazing – and I really believe that the mucky morass of
Philosophy is at last crystallizing about a rigid theory of Logic –
the only portion of Philosophy about which there is a possibility
of man knowing anything . . . Really Logic is all Philosophy.
All else that is loosely so termed is either metaphysics – which
is hopeless, there being no data – or Natural Science e.g.
Psychology.12

Pinsent’s diaries also give insight into some of the more eccen-
tric sides of Wittgenstein’s personality. After he was offered accom-
modation at Trinity College, Wittgenstein went on a shopping tour
for furniture with Pinsent. ‘I went out and helped him interview
a lot of furniture at various shops . . . It was rather amusing: he
is terribly fastidious and we led the shopman a frightful dance,
Vittgenstein [sic] ejaculating “No – Beastly!” to 90% of what he

43
shewed us!’13 Around the same time Wittgenstein told Russell that
‘he dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction,
and can never find anything simple enough’.14 This was of course
the taste of Kraus and Loos, for whom ornament was the expres-
sion of inauthenticity and decadence. Eventually Wittgenstein
decided to have the furniture specially made for him. In an earlier
episode Wittgenstein and Eccles, his friend from Manchester, were
planning to catch a train from Manchester to Liverpool. However,
having missed the train, Wittgenstein suggested hiring an entire
train to bring them to their destination. The plan was eventually
dropped, but he still opted for a costly solution, namely hiring a
taxi. These incidents prove that in his earlier years Wittgenstein
was not quite the hermit he was to become after the First World
War. When he asked Pinsent to accompany him on a trip to
Iceland in September 1912, Pinsent’s reply was that he was unsure
whether he could afford the trip. But Wittgenstein told him not to
worry, because, while he himself had no money either, his father
‘had plenty of it’. He then handed over a considerable amount of
cash to Pinsent. When the journey started, Wittgenstein was

very fussy about taking enough clothing: he himself has three

bags of luggage, and is much perturbed by my single box. He
made me buy a second rug in Cambridge and several other
odds and ends in Edinborough [sic] this morning – especially
as it is not my money I am thus spending.15

During the Iceland trip Wittgenstein proved to be an interest-

ing if very intense and occasionally difficult travel companion.
Together they explored the countryside on ponies during the day
and in the evening Wittgenstein taught Pinsent logic. The friends
had several arguments, some on topics of general interest, for
instance over women’s suffrage (Wittgenstein was against it) and
public schools (he accused them of cruelty and indifference to

44
suffering), but also some personal ones, which were always started
by Wittgenstein. Unlike Pinsent, he was irascible and could perceive
innocent acts as entirely offensive. Thus when Pinsent entered a
conversation with another traveller on the train and went to have a
smoke with him in another carriage, Wittgenstein became furious,
throwing what can only be described as a fit of jealousy and telling
Pinsent that if he pleased he could travel the whole day with the
other man. Thanks to Pinsent’s frankness and friendliness they
soon made up again, but there were other occurrences of what
Pinsent called ‘sulky fits’ during the trip. It has been suggested that
the two friends were really lovers, but there is no evidence for this.
It seems more accurate to say that for Wittgenstein, his relationship
with Pinsent had a very different significance than it had for the
latter. As McGuinness has suggested, for Pinsent the friendship
was following a conventional pattern; it was the kind of friendship
a former public schoolboy like him would have with a person
he had known only for a few months.16 There may have been
suppressed erotic undertones on Wittgenstein’s side – a leitmotif
in Wittgenstein’s relations with other young men, in which the
homoerotic charge was often only experienced by Wittgenstein,
and rarely expressed. Of far greater, indeed tremendous, impor-
tance to him was closeness on both a spiritual and personal level.
Wittgenstein was a very intense human being, ‘he had the idea
of perfection in every area, in the serious matters of everyday life,
in his work, or in the choice of a handkerchief for a present’.17
Once, when he was pacing ‘up and down in my [Russell’s] room
like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence’, Russell asked
him whether he was thinking about logic or his sins, to which
Wittgenstein replied ‘Both.’ He could only tolerate total sincerity
and did not accept compromises about anything, be it personal,
philosophical or aesthetic matters. If such disagreements arose, he
would not only be entirely frank with the other person to the point
of disregarding their feelings, but even try to change their life. It is

45
reported that when, during his first year in Cambridge, he found
out that a certain undergraduate was a monk, Wittgenstein, disap-
proving of the dishonesty he saw in any organized form of religion,
fiercely attacked the man in the presence of others, telling him
that he should read some good book on exact science to see what
honest thought really is. Or again, after attending Moore’s lectures
in October 1912, Wittgenstein, officially only an undergraduate,
sharply criticized the much more senior philosopher. ‘He told me
these lectures were very bad – that what I ought to do was to say
what I thought, not to discuss what other people thought; and he
came no more to my lectures.’18
This frankness, paired with his quick-tempered and overbearing
nature, was not tolerated by everybody. In Wittgenstein’s second
year in Cambridge personal frictions emerged between him and
Russell. One immediate reason was Wittgenstein’s disapproval of
Russell’s essay ‘The Essence of Religion’ (1912), in which he attempted
to formulate a new mysticism based on the ‘infinite part of our
life’. Wittgenstein fiercely attacked Russell for betraying the spirit
of exactness and speaking in public in a fuzzy way about very
intimate issues. ‘Wittgenstein’s criticism disturbed me profoundly.
He was so unhappy, so gentle, so wounded in his wish to think well
of me.’19 Soon after they went to watch a boat race. Wittgenstein’s
reaction, according to Russell, was to say that ‘all was of the devil’:

he suddenly stood still and explained that the way we had spent
the afternoon was so vile that we ought not to live, or at least
he ought not, that nothing is tolerable except producing great
works or enjoying those of others, that he has accomplished
nothing and never will, etc. – all this with a force that knocks
one down. He makes me feel like a bleating lambkin.20

But eventually these scenes became too much even for Russell. On
one occasion he told his pupil to stop thinking so much about him-

46
self, and on another he suggested that Wittgenstein read some
French prose in order to escape the ‘danger of becoming narrow and
uncivilised’ by focusing only on logic. Wittgenstein took such advice
badly. Some months later, in June 1913, Wittgenstein came to Russell
to analyse their relationship, pointing out what he thought was going
wrong between them. After unsuccessfully trying to calm down his
pupil Russell finally said sharply: ‘All you want is a little self-control.’
Upon this Wittgenstein left the room ‘in an air of high tragedy’,
failed to show up at a concert they planned to attend together,
and Russell had to look for him, fearing he might commit suicide.
What also strained the relationship was the fact that the
younger philosopher became more and more critical of Russell’s
ideas and began to develop an increasingly original account of
logic. So dominating and dismissive was Wittgenstein in their
conversations that Russell stopped talking about his work at one
point. When he did show Wittgenstein a manuscript on the theory
of knowledge he was working on, the reaction was merciless:

He said it was all wrong, not realizing the difficulties – that he

had tried my view and knew it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t under-
stand his objection . . . but I feel in my bones that he must be
right, and that he has seen something I have missed. . . . I feel
it is probably all wrong, and that Wittgenstein will think me
a dishonest scoundrel for going on with it.21

In retrospect Russell judged this criticism as an event of ‘first-rate

importance’ in his life, since it made him realize he could not do
any fundamental work in philosophy again. ‘My impulse was shat-
tered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater. I became
filled with utter despair.’22 Russell stopped work on his manuscript
and it was published only posthumously.
Wittgenstein’s second year in Cambridge was marked by
progress in his own philosophical activity. The Christmas break of

47
1912–13, which he spent in the family retreat on the Hochreit and
thus far removed from any academic environment, proved to be
fruitful, and upon his return he reported his progress to Russell.
In March 1913 Wittgenstein’s first publication came out, a short
review of a logic textbook by P. Coffey written for the Cambridge
Review. The sharply critical review, the only one of its kind he ever
wrote, smacked of overconfidence:

In no branch of learning can an author disregard the results of

honest research with so much impunity as he can in Philosophy
and Logic. To this circumstance we owe the publication of such
a book as Mr Coffey’s ‘Science of Logic’: and only as a typical
example of the work of many logicians of to-day does this book
deserve consideration. . . . The author has not taken the slightest
notice of the great work of the modern mathematical logicians –
work which has brought about an advance in Logic comparable
only to that which made Astronomy out of Astrology, and
Chemistry out of Alchemy. . . . The worst of such books as
this is that they prejudice sensible people against the study
of Logic.23

It is noteworthy that in this review Wittgenstein presented himself

as belonging to the camp of the modern logicians, that is, Russell
and Frege, although at the same time he was engaged in a thorough
revision of their accounts of logic. Despite his growing criticism of
these thinkers, his reverence for them was unbroken. This can
also be seen from the fact that in the same year he translated
parts of Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic in collaboration with
Philip Jourdain (the translation was published in The Monist
under Jourdain’s name).
The summer vacation, half of which was spent on the Hochreit
again, while the other half with Pinsent in Norway, was very pro-
ductive. The choice of Norway, a place he would visit many times

48
henceforth, is telling.24 Initially, the two friends had planned to go
to Spain, but the philosophical progress he had achieved on the
Hochreit led Wittgenstein to a change of mind. He now preferred
a quiet holiday allowing for opportunity to work to a voyage full
of distractions, during which he might have been surrounded ‘by
crowds of American tourists, which he can’t stand’ (as Pinsent
reports). The trip was more enjoyable than the previous one to
Iceland. Wittgenstein was now a more amicable companion,
although some ‘sulky fits’ still occurred. They travelled comfort-
ably, mostly in first class, and eventually found a quiet village,
Øystese, in a fjord near Bergen, where they spent three weeks. They
played dominoes, went on walking tours, but also spent a consider-
able amount of time working. Wittgenstein was trying to solve
certain difficult problems about the foundations of logic and this
visibly required all his concentration. As Pinsent describes it,
Wittgenstein would mutter ‘to himself in a mixture of German
and English’ and ‘stride up and down the room all the while’.25
The progress Wittgenstein made during this vacation gave him
some confidence that he was doing something worthwhile. He felt
that his ideas were original and significant enough to be important
to others. But this progress also gave him reason to agonize; for his
valuable ideas could be lost. In his letters to Russell he wrote:

I very often now have the indescribable feeling as though my

work was all sure to be lost entirely in some way or other. But I
still hope this won’t come true. Whatever happens don’t forget
me!’ (5 September 1913)

I have had all sorts of ideas which seem to me very fundamental.

Now the feeling that I shall have to die before able to publish
them is growing stronger in me every day and my greatest wish
would therefore be to communicate everything that I have done
so far to you as soon as possible. (20 September 1913)26

49
At the beginning of October 1913 they met and Wittgenstein gave
Russell a lengthy account of his work on logic. Fortunately, Russell
had ordered a typist to be present, so Wittgenstein’s summary
survived and was eventually published in 1961 as Notes on Logic.
The text formulates fundamental criticisms of Frege’s and Russell’s
conception of the nature of logic, which were later incorporated
in the Tractatus. Notes on Logic is the earliest philosophical text
by Wittgenstein that has been preserved and it provides clear
evidence that his primary interest at the time was the foundations
of logic, and not ethics and mysticism, as it has become fashionable
to claim. Ethics and mysticism were added only at a later stage,
as we shall see, and any interpretation of the Tractatus must take
this genealogy of his interests into account.

Despite this progress, Wittgenstein grew increasingly unhappy

in Cambridge. His vacation breaks, whether on the Hochreit or in
Norway, were more productive than his terms at the university. The
distractions of the human comedy at Cambridge, which stimulated
his morbid sensitivity and irritable disposition, were detrimental to
the difficult intellectual work he needed to undertake. In addition,
he believed that Russell had nothing to teach him any more and
that there was nobody else from whom he could learn anything.
So he decided to leave Cambridge for a longer period and work in
solitude in Norway. Russell was not thrilled about this plan:

my Austrian, Wittgenstein, burst in like a whirlwind, just back

from Norway, and determined to return at once to live in com-
plete solitude until he has solved all the problems of logic. I said
it would be dark, and he said he hated daylight. I said it would
be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelli-
gent people. I said he was mad, and he said God preserve him
from sanity. (God certainly will.) 27

50
Wittgenstein’s and Pinsent’s postcard to William Eccles from Skjolden, Norway, 1913.

Russell eventually accepted this decision. Thus Wittgenstein’s

expensive furniture and a part of his belongings, including some of
his papers, were put in storage and he said farewell to the great uni-
versity that had hosted him for about two years. He left London in
mid-October 1913, arrived in Bergen around three days later and
soon settled in the small village of Skjolden, far away from any
tourist routes and mundane distractions. Skjolden would become
something of a second retreat for a good part of his life, and he
returned there in times of inner turmoil and desire to work. Being
far up in the north, close to the mountains and the glacier, the land-
scape was sober, almost grim, and had a quality of ‘quiet serious-
ness’, as he himself described it. His life in Skjolden was not entirely
frugal and solitary: he lodged with the postmaster, Hans Klingenberg,
who was an educated man and whose family took good care of
Wittgenstein. He made several friends in the small community, for
instance Arne Draegni, the son of a relatively wealthy family, whom
he would visit to make music, and Anna Rebni, a local farmer.
During his first year in Skjolden Wittgenstein learnt Norwegian
and was able to read the works of writers like Ibsen in the original.

51
 More importantly, he soon started to work, feeling that he had
found his much-needed inspiration. He corresponded with both
Russell and Frege on the foundations of logic. The letters he wrote
to Frege have been lost, but their content can be partly inferred
from Frege’s surviving replies and Wittgenstein’s subsequent writ-
ings. Those to Russell were equally important, for they contained
not only his ideas about logic, but also formulated serious objec-
tions to Frege’s views on language and thought. For instance, Frege
held that every simple declarative sentence like ‘Tom is American’
has a sense and a reference. The sense is the thought expressed by
the sentence, in our case the thought that Tom is American.
Thoughts are not material objects; they do not have spatio-temporal
and physical properties, but are ‘abstract’, like numbers. The
reference is the truth-value of the sentence, ‘The True’ or ‘The
False’, which are also abstract objects. Thus every true sentence
refers to the object the True. But, as Wittgenstein noted, this com-
mits the mistake of assimilating sentences to names, for it is the
primary function of names to refer to objects. Sentences are very
unlike names, be it only for the reason that you can negate a sen-
tence, but not a name (what is ‘not Charlie Chaplin’ supposed to
mean, taken by itself?). Wittgenstein also rejected Frege’s account
of intentionality, of the directedness of our thoughts and how they
reach out to reality. Against Frege’s claim that the sentence ‘Tom
believes that it is raining’ signifies a relation between a person
(Tom) and a thought (‘It is raining’), Wittgenstein contended that
when Tom thinks that it is raining, and it is indeed raining, then
what Tom thinks is precisely what is the case, namely that it is rain-
ing. It is not true that there is a third entity, a thought, which is
standing between Tom and reality, between Tom and what is the
case. Rather, Tom’s thought reaches right up to reality and is not
an abstract object, as Frege believes. (Wittgenstein’s theory is
more complicated, since it purports to account for false sentences
as well.)

52
 On his way from Norway to Vienna Wittgenstein visited Frege
in Jena for a few days and had several intensive discussions with
him. The two philosophers did not come to an agreement on any
substantial issue, but while his first visit in 1911 had ended with a
feeling of defeat, Wittgenstein now believed that it was he who
‘wiped the floor with Frege’.28 They never met again. Nevertheless,
Wittgenstein continued to admire Frege and always kept some of
his writings with him, especially Frege’s masterwork, Basic Laws of
Arithmetic, from which he could recite whole passages by heart.
In one of his last diary entries Wittgenstein wrote in 1951: ‘Frege’s
style of writing is sometimes great; Freud writes excellently and it
is a pleasure to read him, but his writing is never great.’29
After his Christmas vacation in Vienna, Wittgenstein returned
to Skjolden and stayed there till June 1914. The problems of logic
and language he was working on were very difficult and he felt he
was making only very slow progress. His mood during these
months seems to have been very dismal, verging on total despair,
if not madness. During no other year did he spend more time con-
templating suicide than in 1914. The circumstances were particularly
severe. He was now not looking for approval from others any more,
as he had done just two years before, but felt that he was expected,
indeed that it was his calling, to solve the hardest problems of
philosophy. Moreover, his brief stay in Vienna, where his family
had commemorated his father’s passing away the previous year
(Karl had died of cancer in January 1913), deeply unsettled him
and only added further to his inner torture. It was ‘logic and sins’
once again. We get a good sense of this double-edged pressure
from his letters to Russell during this time:

Sometimes things inside me are in such a ferment that I think

I am going mad: then the next day I am totally apathetic again.
But deep inside me there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom
of a geyser, and I keep on hoping that things will come to an

53
 eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different
person. I can’t write you anything about logic today. Perhaps
you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but
how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most
important thing is to settle accounts with myself!30

It is VERY sad, but I have once again no logical news for you. The
reason is that things have gone terribly badly for me in the last
weeks. . . . Every day I was tormented by a frightful Angst and by
depression in turns and even in the intervals I was so exhausted
that I wasn’t able to think of doing a bit of work. . . . I never
knew what it meant to feel only one step away from madness.31

Ultimately, and remarkably, this state of mind was not counterpro-

ductive to his work. But it did affect his friendships with both Russell
and Moore. The friendship with Russell received a blow from which
it did not recover, while that with Moore suffered a serious setback
and took many years to heal. We do not know exactly what hap-
pened between Wittgenstein and Russell but presumably early in
1914 Wittgenstein sent the latter a (lost) letter attempting to settle
open issues in their relationship, including possibly Wittgenstein’s
dislike for Russell’s libertarian lifestyle, but also differences in their
attitude to scientific work. Russell seems to have been offended and
his reaction, as he himself put it, was ‘sharp’. A serious quarrel was
the result, soon regretted by Russell, who asked Wittgenstein to lay
the matter to rest. This was the right request to the wrong person:

But I can’t possibly carry out your request . . . that would go

clean contrary to my nature. . . . I have come to the conclusion
that we really don’t suit one another. This is not meant as a
reproach! either for you or for me. But it is a fact. We’ve often
had uncomfortable conversations with one another when cer-
tain subjects came up. . . . Our latest quarrel, too, was certainly

54
 not simply a result of your sensitiveness or my inconsiderate-
ness. It came from deeper – from the fact that my letter must
have shown you how totally different our ideas are, E.G. [sic]
of the value of a scientific work. . . . I can see perfectly well that
your value-judgements are just as good and just as deep-seated
in you as mine in me, and that I have no right to catechize you.
But I see equally clearly, now, that for that very reason there
cannot be any real relation of friendship between us. I shall be
grateful to you and devoted to you with all my heart for the whole
of my life, but I shall not write to you again and you will not see me
again either. Now that I am once again reconciled with you I
want to part from you in peace . . . Goodbye!32

Russell must have been taken aback by this letter. Nevertheless,

he wrote Wittgenstein another conciliatory reply. The latter replied,
thus breaking his resolution, but although his tone was now milder,
Wittgenstein reaffirmed the differences between them. He suggested
that they should never again speak about value-judgements, but
only about objective matters, since he could not bear the hypocrisy
of not being frank to a friend. Of course, it is not the best omen
when friends start legislating which subjects they can discuss and
which not. From early 1914 their relationship became one based on
affection and respect, and their letters were mostly of a philosophical
or at any rate not of an intimate kind.
The tension with Moore was of a different nature and entirely
Wittgenstein’s fault. Wittgenstein repeatedly urged Moore to come
to Skjolden and work there, without realizing that the prospect of
having to leave a comfortable academic environment in order to live
in a remote Norwegian village while being exposed to Wittgenstein’s
overbearing presence might not tempt Moore. Indeed, Moore, a shy
and sensitive man, was slightly afraid of Wittgenstein, especially
after he heard about the quarrel with Russell. His reservations were
eventually dropped and he visited Wittgenstein for two weeks in

55
March to April 1914. The stay was not without pleasant aspects,
as they went on walks rich in stimulating conversations and played
the piano with the Draegni family. But when it came to discussing
philosophy and logic, Wittgenstein was entirely dominant, leaving
to Moore the passive role of the audience. Moore made the best out
of this role and wrote down most of what Wittgenstein said to him.
These Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway comprise some fifteen
pages and were published in 1961. Given how little else survives from
Wittgenstein’s earliest period, these dictations are of great value.
They contain the earliest occurrence of the distinction between
saying and showing, which is not only central to the Tractatus but
has also gained some popularity outside of his philosophy, indeed
outside of philosophy.
Upon his return to Cambridge Moore enquired with a university
official whether it was possible for Wittgenstein, who was still
nominally a ‘research student’, to submit his treatise on logic as a
dissertation to obtain the ba degree. The answer was positive, but
the condition was that the dissertation should fulfil the standard
academic requirements, that is, contain a preface specifying what
was original in the work and endnotes indicating the sources the
author had used. Moore forwarded these requirements, which he
had not stipulated, to Wittgenstein, who then became furious –
not so much with the university as with Moore.

Your letter annoyed me. When I wrote Logik [presumably a

(lost) manuscript] I didn’t consult the Regulations, and there-
fore I think it would only be fair if you gave me my degree with-
out consulting them so much either! As to a Preface and Notes;
I think my examiners will easily see how much I have cribbed
from Bosanquet. – If I am not worth your making an exception
for me even in some stupid details then I may as well go to Hell
directly; and if I am worth it and you don’t do it then – by God
– you might go there.33

56
The hermit’s
retreat:
Wittgenstein’s
house in Skjolden,
Norway, built
before the First
World War.

Even if we take Wittgenstein’s troubled state of mind into account,

this letter was simply rude and unfair. Moore was deeply disturbed
by it, as his diary entries show, and did not reply. Wittgenstein
finally wrote to Moore again, sending him a half-hearted apology.
Still, the friendship had received a heavy blow from which it
recovered only when they met again fifteen years later.
After Moore’s departure, Wittgenstein had a small wooden house
built for him on the shores of a small lake a mile from Skjolden,
planning to have a yet longer and even more secluded sojourn until
he had solved the fundamental problems of logic. It is not clear
whether he stayed in that house at all in 1914, as the furniture had
not been brought in before he left Skjolden, but his desire to live in

57
such ascetic circumstances says much about his tormented soul
and the positive effect loneliness seemed to have on him. Other
philosophers come to mind who chose to live in a hut far from
the machinations of society, most notably Martin Heidegger and
Constantin Noica.34 But while in the case of Heidegger the hut was
only the holiday retreat of a philosophy professor who otherwise
lived in a comfortable villa in his hometown Freiburg, and thus
mere bourgeois romanticism disguised as metaphysics, and in the
case of Noica the seclusion was that of a passive dissident who cul-
tivated his own philosophical school far away from the communist
authorities, in Wittgenstein’s case the seclusion was neither choice
nor external constraint, but came out of inner necessity.
To avoid the impending tourist season, Wittgenstein left
Norway in July 1914 for a visit home. He was not to return until
1921. Wittgenstein was at this moment a very wealthy man, since
he had inherited, like his brother and sisters, a huge fortune from
his father. His income amounted to at least £120,000 per year
(translated into today’s currency, and this might have been just the
interest). But true to the charitable activities of his family, he sought
ways of donating considerable amounts of it. As mentioned earlier,
he was a keen reader of Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, indeed so
keen that he had issues of it sent to Skjolden. It was in one of these
issues that he had come across an article by Kraus on Ludwig von
Ficker, a writer and editor of another Austrian literary journal, Der
Brenner. In his typical satirical tone, Kraus wrote about Der Brenner:
‘That Austria’s only honest review is published in Innsbruck
should be known, if not in Austria, at least in Germany, whose only
honest review is also published in Innsbruck.’35 It was, whether or
not honest, a leading avant-garde journal, in which poets like Else
Lasker-Schüler, Hermann Broch and Georg Trakl, probably the
greatest expressionist poet of the German language, were publish-
ing. The fact that Kraus admired Ficker gave Wittgenstein enough
confidence to offer Ficker £40–50,000 for distribution among

58
artists in need of it. Ficker was at first incredulous of this unexpected
benefaction, but after a few letters were exchanged, he realized
that Wittgenstein’s intentions were genuine. They agreed that the
beneficiaries should be Trakl, Lasker-Schüler, the painter Oskar
Kokoschka, the architect Adolf Loos, the poets Theodor Däubler,
Theodor Haecker, Rainer Maria Rilke and several others.
Wittgenstein did not know the works of most of them. When
Ficker sent him Trakl’s poems, he commented: ‘I do not under-
stand them, but their tone makes me happy. It is the tone of true
genius.’ Remarkably, Wittgenstein almost met Trakl in 1914. While
he was stationed in Krakow as an Austrian soldier, Wittgenstein
learnt that Trakl, also an Austrian soldier, was in hospital there.
He rushed to the hospital where Trakl was treated, but learnt,
much to his consternation, that the poet had killed himself with
an overdose of cocaine just three days before.
Wittgenstein did know and indeed appreciated Rilke’s early
work, which was written in a late nineteenth-century neo-Romantic
style, and was moved by Rilke’s letter of thanks:

[It] both moved and deeply gladdened me. The affection of any
noble human being is a support in the unsteady balance of my
life. I am totally unworthy of the splendid present which I carry
over my heart as a sign and remembrance of this affection. If you
could only convey my deepest thanks and my faithful devotion to
Rilke.36

He came, however, to disapprove of Rilke’s great innovative works

published after the First World War. Contemporary art and litera-
ture were, as mentioned, not to his liking. But there was one excep-
tion: architecture. Among the beneficiaries of his donation Adolf
Loos was the only one whose art Wittgenstein really appreciated,
although it was entirely progressive and modernistic. When
Wittgenstein met Loos for the first time in a Viennese café through

59
the mediation of von Ficker, the philosopher immediately engaged
the architect, who was something of a controversial celebrity in the
capital, in a heated discussion about modern architecture. But there
was no deep-seated disagreement, since both had much in com-
mon, in particular an abhorrence of any kind of ornament. Loos
had displayed his radical minimalism when erecting a much disputed
building opposite the imperial palace, which was known as ‘the
house without eyebrows’, because it lacked even dripstones above
the windows.37 For Loos this was not a purely stylistic choice, but
expressed an ethical position as well. As a vehement opponent to
Art Nouveau he wrote in his essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908) that
ornament was immoral and degenerate, the best sign that a civiliza-
tion was decadent. Something is ornament when it is uselessly
attached to a useful object, thus depriving art of its essence – a true
‘crime’. ‘The evolution of culture is synonymous with the elimina-
tion of ornament from objects of daily use.’38 We can see how this
austere minimalism appealed to Wittgenstein’s ideal of purity as
a quality he had found so appealing in Weininger’s writings. Loos
soon became a reference point for Wittgenstein and was to influ-
ence his own architectural endeavours when he helped build a
mansion for his sister Margarete in the 1920s. However, after the
war he came to dislike Loos, because in his eyes Loos had become
infected with ‘virulent bogus intellectualism’. This pattern of attrac-
tion and disaffection, of interest and disappointment, characterized
many of Wittgenstein’s relationships; if the person in question was
not up to his standards, ethical or otherwise, he was simply not able
to meet them any more. Wittgenstein had to accept their entire
personality or discontinue the friendship.

60
 3

In the Trenches, 1914–18

On 28 July 1914 Austria declared war on Serbia. Although not liable

to military service owing to a hernia, Wittgenstein volunteered for
service on 7 August. Two days later he started work on the earliest
surviving manuscript of the Tractatus, the manuscript that is now
classified as MS 101 (published in Notebooks, 1914–1916). Throughout
the war he continued working on philosophy. His method of work,
then as later, was to enter insights into notebooks in the form of sepa-
rate but related remarks. These were sometimes no more than a sen-
tence or two of highly condensed reflection, the trajectory of which
was indicated but not elaborated. At least five more manuscripts were
to follow before he considered this book completed in the summer of
1918. The Tractatus was thus entirely composed during the war, while
its author was serving at the front, at times in the trenches, in the
middle of dreadful battles. The experience of war left its mark on the
author and his book. His work on the foundations of logic and lan-
guage was not affected, but the last pages of the Tractatus deal with
ethics and mysticism, topics that he approached later in the war.
Wittgenstein enlisted out of the patriotic feeling that he needed
to defend his country but, unlike most of his countrymen, he did
not share the enthusiasm about the war that drove millions to
senseless death. He wrote in his diary:

[It] seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper

hand against England. The English – the best race in the world

61
 – cannot lose. We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this
year, then next year. The thought that our race is going to be
beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.1

Patriotism aside, the other reason for going to war was a feeling
typical of others as well, especially for intellectuals: the feeling that
Europe was decadent and dead, that one had to do something real,
reconnect to ‘life’. As his sister Hermine explains in her memoirs,
Wittgenstein ‘had the intense wish to assume some heavy burden
and to perform some task other than purely intellectual work’.
He viewed the war, like other contemporaries, as a personal test,
believing he would only discover his worth by facing death.
Wittgenstein got a first taste of the war very soon. Initially
assigned to an artillery regiment, he was, ten days after his enlist-
ment, transferred to a small gunboat, the Goplana, which ventured
down the Vistula river into enemy territory. Here is his account of the
first assignment, in his nightwear, a day after his arrival on the boat:

Suddenly woke about 1 a.m. Called for by the Lieutenant who

says I must go to the searchlight straightaway: ‘no getting
dressed’. I ran to the bridge almost naked. Icy wind, rain.
I was certain I was going to die on the spot. . . . I was frightfully
agitated and groaned audibly. I felt the terrors of war. Now
(in the evening) I have got over the terror. Unless I change my
present bent of mind I’ll strive with all my might to stay alive.2

The task of manning the searchlight was that of a private and rela-
tively dangerous. The real problem, however, was his shipmates,
and later his comrades at the Eastern front, whom he found
unbearable. With a few exceptions they were, from his point of
view, ‘a company of drunkards, a company of vile and stupid people’,
‘malicious and heartless’, ‘appallingly limited’, indeed lacking
humanity, as he wrote in his diary in the spring of 1916. Most of

62
them were working-class men with whom Wittgenstein had little
in common. But the life on a crammed ship in a limiting situation
brought out the differences between them and him much more
strongly. He felt hated by them and in turn hated them. His man-
ners and mannerisms, his fastidiousness and refinement were only
a liability in these circumstances, especially as these distinctive
features did not correlate with higher rank. As in the school in
Linz, he felt ostracized and betrayed. He tried repeatedly to exercise
Christian humility, urging himself to understand and tolerate his
comrades. But even when the hatred was overcome, his disgust
persisted. Nevertheless, and this was a typical Wittgensteinian
self-torture, he did not seek relief from this situation; although
he was entitled to certain privileges having graduated in Linz,
Wittgenstein refused to make use of them for a prolonged period.
Wittgenstein was caught up in the ill-fated Eastern campaign
of 1914, which came to a halt, if not retreat, in early November,
and his diary gives an accurate depiction of disintegrating Austrian
morale. It also gives us, through encoded notations, an invaluable
insight into his philosophical progress, and into more intimate
matters. We also get an understanding of his general state of mind,
the phases of heavy depression interspersed with almost mystical
outbursts. These were a novelty, since Wittgenstein was not reli-
gious before the war, having lost his childhood faith in Linz. The
war changed him. It is hard to say whether we can speak of a prop-
er conversion. But it would be certainly wrong to describe him as
non-religious after August 1914. It was some time early in his service
that he went into a bookstore in Tarnow, discovering that apart
from postcards it contained only one book: Tolstoy’s Gospel in
Brief. He bought it, read and re-read it, and kept it on him at all
times (which earned him the byword ‘the one with the Gospels’
from his comrades). As McGuinness sees it, Wittgenstein found in
Tolstoy’s version of Christianity a path to happiness that seemed
to suit his wretched situation in the army, if not even his earlier

63
Wittgenstein’s military identity card.

misery, for it offered a recipe for becoming independent of exter-

nally induced humiliation and suffering: to be saved from death,
one must renounce one’s selfish instincts and become one with the
spirit that unites us all in God. One must live a life in the service of
others, immortalize oneself by fighting against the egoistic nature
that is the true source of all suffering. Tolstoy certainly provided
him with consolation:

The news gets worse and worse. Tonight there will be instant
readiness. I work every day, more or less, and with fair confi-
dence. I say Tolstoy’s words again and again in my head. ‘Man
is powerless in the flesh but free because of the spirit.’ May the
spirit be in me! . . . How will I behave when it comes to shoot-
ing? I am not afraid of being shot but of not doing my duty
properly. God give me strength! Amen. Amen. Amen.3

64
He wrote a day later: ‘Now I may have the opportunity to be a
decent human being, because I am face to face with death.’ No
doubt a religious voice is speaking here, but it is Christian only in
so far as it is mediated through Tolstoy’s interpretation. After all,
Wittgenstein’s prayers were brief and invoked the ‘spirit’, not Jesus.
Was this not rather an intellectual’s rationalized version of religion,
a refined version of the ‘duty to oneself ’ urged by Weininger? Not
so much a real belief in Jesus’ teachings, his crucifixion and the mys-
tery of his resurrection, but the acceptance of Tolstoyan inwardness
as the best recipe to cope with serious existential difficulties? Such
a ‘streamlined’ form of religion had its own tradition in Western
thought, having precursors in David Friedrich Strauss, Schopenhauer
and Ralph Waldo Emerson (the latter two read by Wittgenstein
during the war as well). These are difficult questions. In any case,
he felt Christian enough to be troubled by Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ,
a book he read towards the end of 1914:

I am strongly affected by [Nietzsche’s] hostility against Christian-

ity. Because his writings too have some truth in them. To be sure,
Christianity is the only sure way to happiness; but what if someone
spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily
in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life
is senseless. . . . what must I do in order that my life shall not be
lost to me? I must be conscious of it all the time.4

Questions about life and death were of personal not philosophi-

cal concern to Wittgenstein at this time, and the coded diary
entries about them stand next to his extensive, but unrelated and
not coded, notes on the foundations of logic, language and ontol-
ogy. This needs to be stressed to counter those exaggerated if fash-
ionable interpretations that claim that his ethical and his logical
concerns were two sides of the same coin. When he came under
enemy fire or plunged into the immense suffering of his inner

65
abyss, Wittgenstein did not seek salvation through the solution
of Russell’s Paradox and did not pray to the Muse of Logic or the
Great Quantifier, but to the God of Tolstoy’s Gospel. To claim some
kind of unity between his logical investigations and his religious
problems is to romanticize the former and trivialize the latter.
Wittgenstein spent 1915 in relative safety in an artillery workshop
in Krakow, where his skills as an engineer were much relied upon.
In the summer he suffered a minor injury from an explosion in the
workshop and had to spend some time in hospital. He then returned
to another artillery shop, located on board a train close to Lvov.
Finally, at his own request, he was transferred to a howitzer regiment
on the Russian front in Galicia in March 1916. Here he volunteered for
service at the artillery observation post at night, the place and time of
maximal risk. McGuinness describes this phase as ‘one of the hardest
times of his life’ and this is not exaggerated.5 Wittgenstein contracted
food-poisoning and other illnesses, felt ostracized by his comrades
and, finally, towards the end of April experienced his first combat
situation at an observation-post where he came under direct fire.
Nevertheless, he felt that he would commit suicide if he were to be
sent away. ‘Perhaps nearness to death will bring light into my life.’6
There is something moving and inspiring in the way Wittgenstein
exhorts himself in this period of grave danger. Despite what his sister
Hermine believed at times, he was certainly not a saint. But there is a
disarming authenticity in his diary entries, an authenticity that many
of those who met him have observed. In the midst of battles he finds
consolation in prayers, in soliloquies with himself and God. ‘My soul
shrivels up. God give me light! God give me light! God give light to
my soul!’7 ‘God is all that man needs.’8 How different is this man from
the arrogant student in Cambridge, who, in Russell’s own words,
was more terrible with Christians than Russell himself!

Do your best. You cannot do more. And be cheerful. Be content

with yourself. Because others will not prop you up or at most

66
 only for a short time (then you will become burdensome to
them). Help yourself and help others with your strength. And at
the same time be cheerful. But how much strength ought one to
use for oneself and how much for others? It is difficult to live a
good life. But the good life is something fine. Yet not my will
but thine be done.9

It was only after spending several months under the most dan-
gerous circumstances that these personal notes began to connect
with the philosophical system he was developing, in the form of
uncoded general remarks about God, ethics and the meaning of life,
some of which made it into the last pages of the Tractatus. They
reflect not only his recent experiences, but also his readings of
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (he read
The Brothers Karamazov so many times that he knew whole pas-
sages from it by heart). Here is a sample of these powerful remarks:

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 eyes in its
visual field. – That something about it is problematic, which we
call its meaning. – That this meaning does not lie in it but out-
side it. – That life is 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.10

Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world. – If by

eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-
temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he
lives in the present. – In order to live happily I must be in agree-
ment with the world. And that is what ‘being happy’ means. – I
am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which
I appear dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will of God’. –

67
 Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. – a bad, life.11

When a general ethical law of the form ‘Thou shalt . . .’ is set up,
the first thought is: Suppose I do not do it? – But it is clear that
ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward. So this
question about the consequences of an action must be unim-
portant. At least these consequences cannot be events. For there
must be something right about the question after all. There
must be a kind of ethical reward and of ethical punishment but
these must be involved in the action itself. – And it is also clear
that the reward must be something pleasant, the punishment
something unpleasant. – I keep on coming back to this! simply
the happy life is good, the unhappy bad. And if I now ask
myself: But why should I live happily, then this of itself seems
to me to be a tautological question; the happy life seems to be
justified, of itself, it seems that it is the only right life. – But this
is really in some sense deeply mysterious! It is clear that ethics
cannot be expressed!12

We find in these remarks several interconnected themes. One is

about human happiness: it is achieved only through good deeds and
in these good deeds. Happiness cannot be achieved if understood
as an external goal. Related to this is a Stoic attitude of not being
affected by any event in the world, especially life-threatening events.
Another related theme is moral solipsism, the view that good and
evil are not in the world, but given through me, my perspective on
the entire world. Finally, there is the contention that ethics is
‘transcendental’, that the most important values in human life,
the Good, happiness, God, all things he summarized by the term
‘the Higher’, are not part of this world, nothing that one could find
or discover through a scientific observation of the physical realm.
Values are given through an attitude towards the entire world, and
thus cannot be part of the world. But since all that can be expressed,

68
that is, the real objects in the world and their properties, must
be expressible in terms of scientific language, it follows that the
content of ethics cannot be expressed. It can only be shown. We
encounter here the distinction between what can be said and what
only shown that is crucial for his logical and metaphysical doctrines
as well, as we will see. But, we may already ask, has Wittgenstein
himself not just told us, at least to some extent, what ethics consist
in? Has he not just said that values are not part of this world, that
the good deed finds reward in itself etc., indeed that ethics is that
very thing about which one cannot talk? There is something para-
doxical about this saying/showing distinction, as applied to his
views on ethics and those on logic and metaphysics.
Wittgenstein was aware that the scope of his investigation had
widened. As he put it towards the end of the summer of 1916: ‘My
work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of
the world.’13 His diary entries in this period are much more sparse
than before, but it remains an amazing fact that he managed to
do any philosophy under the given circumstances. For this was no
ordinary summer. His division had been caught up in the Russian
Brusilov offensive and forced to retreat with very heavy losses
(around 80 per cent, according to some calculations). His division
then fought in the Bukovina and in the battle of Kolomea. His con-
duct during the fighting was exemplary, as we know from reports
by his officers. One such report states that ‘Ignoring the heavy
artillery fire on the casemate and the exploding mortar bombs
[Wittgenstein] observed the discharge of the mortars and located
them. . . . By this distinctive behaviour he exercised a very calming
effect on his comrades.’ 14 He received two medals and was promoted
to the rank of corporal.
Owing to his conduct at the front Wittgenstein was sent to an
officers’ school in Olmütz, Moravia, in October 1916. Here he met
Paul Engelmann, a young Jewish architect, pupil of Loos and friend
of Kraus, who shared much of Wittgenstein’s artistic outlook and

69
occasionally published in Die Fackel. They soon became close friends.
It was a remarkable friendship, which lasted for well over a decade
and would eventually lead to their cooperation on building the
famous mansion for Margarete Wittgenstein in the late 1920s.
In Olmütz Wittgenstein started to participate in Engelmann’s
literary circle, made up mostly of cultivated young Jews, literati,
artists, etc. He immediately became the centre point of the circle,
indeed something of a star. He was member of a famous Viennese
family, had a refined sense of culture, had studied philosophy and
logic with Russell in Cambridge, was developing his own philo-
sophical system and, last but not least, had just returned from the
Eastern front, where he had been face to face with death. The mem-
bers of the circle staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Molière’s
Le Malade imaginaire; they read classic German poets such as
Goethe and Schiller (on one of these occasions Wittgenstein praised
Schiller’s love for freedom); they performed Salonmusik, for instance
by Schubert and Brahms; they engaged in conversations about
ethics, aesthetics and authors dear to Wittgenstein, such as
Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Weininger; and they
read the New Testament together. Wittgenstein even made them
read some Frege and he explained his philosophical system to
Engelmann. Compared to the moral and existential morass of the
Front these encounters were bliss. But Olmütz provided him not
only with relaxation for his battered soul; this encounter with a
select group of intellectuals led also to a heightened interest for
questions of aesthetics, reflections on which resurfaced in the
Tractatus. It was here that he finally managed to make a connec-
tion between logic, ethics and aesthetics, and thus confirm
Weininger’s idea that all three were one and the same, an idea that
actually goes back to antiquity.15 He wrote in his diary: ‘The work
of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis and the good life is
the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection
between art and ethics.’16

70
 The encounter with the Olmütz circle can be seen as noteworthy
in another respect: it was Wittgenstein’s only encounter with a
Jewish environment. But the Jewishness of these young men was
not very substantial. What connected both parties was ‘the need
for a self-made religion’.17 As McGuinness sees it, Wittgenstein was
looking for a substitute for his traditional Christian upbringing,
while the Olmütz intellectuals were looking for an alternative to
a Jewishness that had lost its traditional meaning.18
In January 1917 Wittgenstein returned to the Eastern front as
an officer. He had just donated 1 million crowns to the Austrian
government for the development of a 12-inch howitzer. He was
soon involved in heavy fighting again, in the Kerensky Offensive,
awarded another medal for gallantry and recommended for further
promotion. In February 1918 he was promoted to lieutenant, and in
March he was transferred to the Italian front. In the Austrian June
offensive he behaved with outstanding courage and saved the lives
of several comrades. He was recommended for the gold medal for
valour (the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross), but was
eventually awarded a slightly lesser distinction. In a report about
him we read: ‘His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness,
sang-froid, and heroism won the total admiration of the troops.
By his conduct he gave a splendid example of loyal and soldierly
fulfilment of duty.’19
The year 1918 was important for Wittgenstein in several
respects. First, the war came to an end, for him in fact a week earlier
than the final Armistice, since he was taken prisoner by the Italians
near Trento. Second, it was the year in which he lost his dear friend
David Pinsent. Pinsent had not been called up for active duty
during the war, but had trained as a test pilot. He crashed with
his plane on a test flight in May 1918. This was a grave loss for
Wittgenstein and may explain his subsequent plan to kill himself
while on leave in Austria. There is some indication that his uncle
Paul Wittgenstein saved his life. Paul, an estate manager, painter

71
and patron of the arts, who had a weakness for his nephew,
bumped into Ludwig at Salzburg train station when Ludwig was
contemplating suicide.20 Pinsent and Wittgenstein had exchanged
letters during the war (via Switzerland) and Pinsent’s letters were a
great source of comfort. When he received Pinsent’s first war letter
in 1914, Wittgenstein kissed it out of excitement. He had a great
desire to see his friend again, addressing him as ‘My dear Davy’ and
writing in his diary ‘Lovely letter from David. . . . Answered David.
Very sensual.’21 These passages suggest that Ludwig may indeed
have felt unrequited love for David, a fact of which he was not
unaware, writing in his diary: ‘I wonder whether he thinks of me
half as much as I think of him.’
Last but not least, 1918 was also the year in which Wittgenstein
completed his book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He dedicated
it to David Pinsent.

72
 4

Logic and Mysticism: The Tractatus

The Tractatus was the fruit of six years of intense labour and the
only philosophical book published in Wittgenstein’s lifetime. He
initially called it Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung and it was only
later that the English translation received, on Moore’s suggestion,
the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by which it is known
today. How the book was finally put together is not fully docu-
mented. As mentioned, in the period 1914–18 he filled several note-
books, which he then unified in a single manuscript. The last man-
uscript (MS 104) is the most important one, as it largely prefigures
the actual book, save the ordering of its proposition and the
Preface. Now known as the Prototractatus, it was published in 1971.
The Tractatus is a unique book in the history of philosophy, if only
because of its style. It is short, around 90 pages in the English
translation. It consists of the following seven main propositions:

1. The world is everything that is the case.

2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
(An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
– – –
6. The general form of truth-function is: [p, ξ, N (ξ)].
This is the general form of proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

73
Each of these propositions, apart from the last one, is further
explained by other numbered entries, and so on. For instance,
proposition 1 is explained by 1.1 (‘The world is the totality of facts,
not things’), which in turn is explained by two further propositions,
1.11 and 1.12. This gives the book the impression of a precisely
structured investigation, almost like a mathematical proof, and
indeed the numbered propositions bear some similarity to the
proofs in the Principia Mathematica. Probably the only other book
in European philosophy that surpasses its aspiration to mathematical
beauty and simplicity is Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), which has defini-
tions, axioms and lemmas, just like an actual mathematical proof.
But the Tractatus is probably more difficult to understand, not least
because it is dense with the technical terminology and formalism
of modern mathematical logic, which is not penetrable without
familiarity with the logic of Frege and Russell. Also, Wittgenstein,
unlike Spinoza, does not define many of his key notions and does
not indicate how he has arrived at his propositions. The readers are
left to figure out for themselves what these propositions mean and
what the arguments leading to them consist of. We would have
probably been at a loss if none of his notebooks had survived.
The understanding of the book is further complicated by the
fact that in composing it Wittgenstein followed a certain aesthetic
ideal. It is certainly not true, as some interpreters have suggested,
that the Tractatus must be seen as a work of art, a ‘poem’.1 And it
is not correct, as Terry Eagleton has it, that the ‘true coordinates’
of the Tractatus are really Joyce, Schönberg and Picasso, and not
Frege and Russell.2 The true coordinates of the book are Frege and
Russell, and their investigations into the nature of logic. It contains
a complex philosophical system, based on predominantly implicit
arguments, but arguments nevertheless. But it is true that there is
a strongly artistic side to the book. Wittgenstein was always drawn
to writing fragments and aphorisms, partly through the influence
of Schopenhauer and Lichtenberg, and this explains the fragmen-

74
tary character of many of his writings. In addition, he was attracted
to Loos’s and Weininger’s ideal of purity and minimalism, an ideal
that, as discussed earlier, denounced any ornament as a ‘crime’. In
the Preface Wittgenstein writes: ‘If this work has any value, it con-
sists in . . . [the fact] that thoughts are expressed in it, and on this
score the better the thoughts are expressed – the more the nail has
been hit on the head – the greater will be its value.’ Wittgenstein
subjected his philosophical prose to the perfectionist ideal of find-
ing the most precise expression, ‘the liberating word’3 that would
be ‘setting the carriage precisely on the rails’.4 He looked at his
writing with the eyes of a poet; no word or sentence should be
superfluous or casual. ‘I think I summed up my attitude to phil-
osophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a
poetic composition.’5 He wrote this around 1933, but it is represen-
tative of his lifelong attitude to the composition of philosophical
texts. This attitude was particularly extreme with respect to the
Tractatus. For in this book Wittgenstein sought to eliminate any
redundancy by keeping his prose condensed to a bare minimum.
Many propositions of the Tractatus exhibit therefore the character
of definitive oracular pronouncements. As he self-critically
acknowledged later, ‘[e]very sentence in the Tractatus should be
seen as the heading of a chapter needing further exposition’.6
Wittgenstein was not interested in writing a book for an academic
audience, but in reaching a kind of crystalline beauty. We find
confirmation of this self-imposed aesthetic requirement in an early
report by Russell:

I told him he ought not simply to state what he thinks true, but
to give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty,
and that he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy
hands. I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that,
and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments. I
am seriously afraid that no one will see the point of anything he

75
 writes, because he won’t recommend it by arguments addressed
to a different point of view.7

What is now the content of the Tractatus? A detailed answer

would be the subject of a long monograph, but the general idea of the
book is not too difficult to sketch. The Tractatus is a breathtakingly
ambitious book. Above all, it claims to give the definitive account
of the nature of philosophy and the final solution of the problems
of philosophy. In particular, it offers an account of the essence of lan-
guage (logic), the world (ontology) and their relation (intentionality).
It also attempts to clarify the status of mathematics and scientific
theories, reconciles solipsism with realism, denounces scepticism,
and determines the nature of aesthetics, ethics and mysticism.
The Tractatus’s account of language is the core topic of the
book, with the ontology giving it the metaphysical underpinning.
Wittgenstein’s ontology is atomistic, like Russell’s. The world is
composed of basic, simple elements that cannot be divided further.
They are not the atoms of the physicists, but something more
abstract. In Wittgenstein’s case they are so-called atomic or elemen-
tary facts. That the broom is standing in the corner is a fact, for
instance. However, this fact is not an elementary one, but rather
compound; it can be divided further, that is, into the fact that the
broomstick and the brush are standing in certain spatial relations
to each other and the fact that the broomstick and the brush are
standing in certain spatial relations to the corner, etc. What then
is an example of an elementary fact? Wittgenstein does not tell us,
since his task at this stage is wholly programmatic. All that he tells
us is that each elementary fact is not further divisible and obtains
independently of any other facts.
Thus one aspect of Wittgenstein’s atomism concerns facts. The
other concerns objects. After all, what makes a fact is that objects are
related to each other in a certain way, for example, the broomstick
and the brush. Just as there are elementary facts there are also atomic

76
objects, which are not further divisible. Save for some uncertain
examples, such as the smallest visible spot in the visual field,
Wittgenstein does not indicate what these atomic objects might be.
Again, we are only given a general description: for example, that an
elementary fact consists of certain atomic objects being related to
each other in a certain way, or that ordinary physical objects are not
atomic objects, but composed out of atomic objects. Of course, facts
may come and go, but the atomic objects remain just the same. They
can occur in various different facts, but they are indestructible, since
they are not further divisible. They are what Wittgenstein calls ‘the
substance of the world’ – that of which everything there is consists.
Every atomic object has a metaphysical essence. What is it? It is the
totality of all facts in which it can occur. This may sound mysterious,
but it is not really. For instance, the metaphysical essence of the
broomstick (assuming, to illustrate, that it is an atomic object) con-
sists of all the possible facts of which it might be a part. For it is part
of the broomstick’s essence not only that it is stuck into the brush,
as it actually is, but also that it could be lying on the left of the brush,
on the right of it, on top of it, etc. All these possibilities are already
inscribed into the inner essence of the broomstick and thus fully
determine its nature. Imagine we have a list of all atomic objects in
the world. In that case we would be able to determine any possible
course of the world, that is, every possible fact, everything that
might be the case – all possible worlds. No possibility could ever
be surprising in this glacial and crystalline Tractarian world.
Wittgenstein had initially given his treatise the working title
‘Der Satz’ (‘The proposition’ or ‘The sentence’), a clear proof that
the nature of propositions occupies the centre stage of the book.
Wittgenstein’s focus on propositions, that is, declarative state-
ments like ‘Ronaldo is a football player’ or ‘The moon is 239,000
miles away from Earth’, is not arbitrary. For the main function of
language is to describe the world, and propositions are the smallest
units of communication. His theory of proposition consists of two

77
Wittgenstein’s annotated bilingual edition of Tractatus.

aspects. The first aspect can be summarized by the label ‘logical

atomism’. Atomism applies to propositions as much as it applies
to facts. There are complex propositions, such as ‘Ronaldo is a
Brazilian football player and Maradona is an Argentinian football
player’, and they consist of elementary (or atomic) propositions,
in our case of ‘Ronaldo is a Brazilian football player’ and ‘Maradona
is an Argentinian football player’. Elementary propositions are ele-
mentary in a similar way in which elementary facts are elementary:
they are true or false independently of whether any other elemen-
tary proposition is true or false. Note, however, that the sentences
just mentioned are only illustrations, not really examples of elemen-
tary propositions. But what is then an example of an elementary
proposition? Again, Wittgenstein does not tell us, since his approach
is purely programmatic.
The second aspect of his theory can be summarized by the
label ‘picture theory of proposition’. Propositions are pictures.

78
Every proposition is a description of a possible fact. Giving an
account of what a proposition is, what makes it meaningful and
how it manages to describe a fact, is of pivotal importance for
understanding how any discourse about the world, and in
particular scientific discourse, is possible. Legend has it that
Wittgenstein thought of the picture theory when he read in
a newspaper about a Parisian trial in which toys were used to
depict a car accident. For example, one could use a blue toy car
to depict a real blue car and a red toy bus to depict a real bus. In
addition, one could draw an intersection on a paper depicting the
real intersection and then place the toy cars in a way that depicts
the way the real cars were related to each other. Wittgenstein
took this to be the essence of pictures in general and of linguistic
pictures, that is, propositions, in particular. The elements of
a picture stand for the objects they depict, and the way the
elements are ordered in the picture mirrors the depicted fact.
Similarly, the elements of a proposition, the words, stand for the
objects they depict. A proposition is true if the expressions con-
tained in it are arranged in a way similar to the way in which the
objects for which they stand are arranged. To give a very simplified
example: the proposition ‘Ronaldo is standing left of Maradona’
is true in a situation in which Ronaldo is standing left of
Maradona, since the name ‘Ronaldo’ is also standing left of the
name ‘Maradona’. The connection between language and reality
is established via private mental acts of meaning by a given word
‘w’, the object ‘w’ is meant to stand for. It follows that the meaning
of every word is the object it stands for, and thus that every word
is the name of an object. If a word does not stand for an object, it
is meaningless. Propositions, we can conclude, consist of names,
and if a proposition contains at least one meaningless word, then
the proposition is meaningless as well. This is how we can visualize
the picture theory:

79
 language world

True propositions describe Facts

consist of consist of
configurations of

Names stand for Objects

We see that language and the world are intimately connected.

Propositions are supposed to consist solely of names. This does not
sound very plausible, since there seem to be so many propositions
that do not even contain names, for example, ‘It is raining’ or
‘All monkeys sleep too much’. But this is not a problem for
Wittgenstein, since for him, as for Russell, the real structure of
language cannot be read off the surface of the ordinary sentences
we usually utter. To find out the real structure of our propositions
we must employ logical analysis. All languages have the same deep
structure, which we can uncover by formal logic. This is an idea
that became very dominant not only in analytic philosophy but
also in linguistics, for example, via Noam Chomsky’s theories of
generative grammar after the Second World War.
There is a further important aspect of Wittgenstein’s theory.
Since a proposition is a picture, it is meaningful insofar as it
describes a possible fact. The fact does not have to obtain; it is
contingent. If a fact obtains, it is intelligible to assume that it
might not have obtained, and if does not obtain, it is intelligible
to assume that it might have obtained. For instance, if this table is
brown, then the possibility that it could be green is still intelligible.
Indeed, it must be intelligible if the proposition ‘This table is
brown’ is to be meaningful and have a sense. In short: a proposi-
tion is meaningful only if it depicts a fact that could be otherwise,
only if the proposition is capable of being true and capable of being

80
false. (The only exception to this rule are the propositions of logic,
i.e. tautologies such as ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining’,
which, given that they are necessarily true, cannot be false even in
principle.)
This aspect of Wittgenstein’s theory of proposition has dramatic
consequences, not least for his own theory. For it means that a
proposition that tries to depict some non-contingent fact, for
example a ‘metaphysical fact’, which could not be otherwise, is
simply meaningless. Any proposition whose negation is inconceiv-
able is of this kind. Take for instance the statement ‘Red is a
colour’. Could red not be a colour? What would this mean? How
could we find out that red is not a colour? This seems to be a sheer
impossibility. Or take ‘This table is an object’. Sentences of this
kind only look like genuine propositions, but are in fact pseudo-
propositions. It follows that all the metaphysical propositions of
traditional philosophy, for example Spinoza’s theory about the
identity of God with nature or Schopenhauer’s claim that the world
is the product of will, are meaningless. Equally, Russell’s state-
ments about the essence of the world that he needed in order to
defend his logic turn out to be without meaning. And last, but not
least, the propositions of the Tractatus themselves prove now to be
totally meaningless, indeed pure nonsense! For is it not the case
that they are trying to describe the metaphysical, unchangeable
essence of the world and of language? Indeed, this is what they are
trying to do. Take the first proposition of the Tractatus, ‘The world
is everything that is the case’, and assume that it is true. For it to be
meaningful, according to the picture theory, this proposition must
depict a contingent fact. It should be at least intelligible to imagine
that the world is not everything that is the case. But this is precisely
what is not possible, since the proposition does attempt to describe
a non-contingent, essential feature of the world. The ontological
propositions of the Tractatus thus turn out to be nonsensical (not:
false). The semantic theory of the book does not fare better. Take

81
 A page of
Wittgenstein’s
annotations to the
typescript of the
English translation
of the Tractatus.

the proposition ‘A proposition is a picture of reality’ (Tractatus

4.01). Does this describe a contingent fact, which could be other-
wise? It certainly does not, at least not according to the Tractatus.
Rather, it describes an essential feature of any proposition whatso-
ever, a feature no proposition could ever lack without becoming
meaningless. Thus proposition 4.01 falls under Wittgenstein’s own
nonsense verdict: it fails to describe a contingent fact and is thus
meaningless. And so do almost all other propositions in his book.
They try to say something that cannot be put in words. They are
pseudo-propositions. As Frank Ramsey (1903–1930), one of the
earliest reviewers of the Tractatus and later a friend of Wittgenstein,

82
expressed it, ‘What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle
it either’ (a humorous hint to Wittgenstein’s remarkable ability to
whistle any tune).
Wittgenstein helps himself out of this impasse by making a
distinction between what can be said, that is, contingent facts
about the world, which are the subject matter of science, and
what cannot be said, but shows itself – the metaphysical essence
of language and the world. This is the actual justification of the
famous distinction between saying and showing. It follows that
there are no philosophical propositions, no philosophical claims
that can be expressed. All deep truths can only be shown.
Philosophy is not a science and not in competition with science,
offering doctrines and hypotheses about the world, whether
empirically testable or justified through a priori reasoning. It does
not add to the sum of human knowledge. Rather, philosophy is a
discipline in its own right, ‘above or below the natural sciences,
not beside them’ (Tractatus 4.111). It is an activity, and to a large
degree a critical one, namely the clarification of language by
means of logical analysis.

The correct method in philosophy would really be the following:

to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural
science – i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy
– and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something
metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a
meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would
not be satisfying to the other person – he would not have the
feeling that we were teaching him philosophy – this method
would be the only strictly correct one [Tractatus 6.53].

The conception of philosophy intimated here was radical and new

at the time. It marks what has come to be known as the linguistic
turn, a paradigm change that, Wittgenstein thought, finally gave

83
philosophy the rigorous method philosophers had always been
looking for. Unlike his predecessors, Wittgenstein envisaged this
method to consist of the analysis of language, not the world. The
sole task for future philosophy is to monitor the bounds of sense in
order to delimit science from the nonsense of metaphysics, namely
by elucidating the hidden logical forms of philosophically problem-
atic sentences. Some aspects of this linguistic turn had been formu-
lated by Frege and Russell as well, but it was really the Tractatus
that heralded this paradigm change in an explicit manner. It was a
paradigm that remained very influential in philosophy, at least in
the Anglophone world, until the 1970s.
The philosophy of the Tractatus can be seen as defending sci-
ence against metaphysics. Nevertheless, the book itself is highly
metaphysical, indeed mystical. It delimits what can be genuinely
said, namely by means of science, from what cannot, but the latter
is not a chimera. There are deep metaphysical truths, although they
are strictly ineffable and can only be shown, indeed felt. In a line
reminiscent of certain mystics Wittgenstein writes: ‘To view the
world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical’
(Tractatus 6.45). Linguistic analysis is not meant to deny these
truths, but make room for them, in other words make room for
metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, God, in short for all that which
Wittgenstein subsumes under the label ‘the Higher’. Thus we do
find remarks about the Higher at the end of the Tractatus. We can
speak only about what is in the world, for example, the World Cup
of 2006, stockmarkets, 9/11, climate change, social policy, molecu-
lar genetics, the solar system, etc. But ‘[h]ow things are in the world
is a matter of complete indifference for what is the Higher. God
does not reveal himself in the world’ (Tractatus 6.432). It is in this
context that Wittgenstein presents several of his remarks on ethics
and the meaning of life he wrote in the trenches in 1916. The mean-
ing of life, the primary subject of ethics, is radically transcendent

84
and cannot be expressed. The most important things are ineffable.
‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been
answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of
course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer’
(Tractatus 6.52). ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into
words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’
(Tractatus 6.522). Thence the famous concluding remark that
what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Ironically, it is this remark and the previous ones on ethics that
have generated a massive secondary literature. But if we are to take
Wittgenstein seriously, then silence should mean silence. As he
explained to Ludwig von Ficker in a letter from October 1919,

the point of the book is ethical. . . . I wanted to write that my

work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of
everything 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 I have defined in my book by remain-
ing silent about it.8

To be sure, Wittgenstein is exaggerating here the ethical aspect

of the book, given that its main focus is actually logic and meta-
physics, not ethics. After all, from the six years he spent writing
this book, only a few months were dedicated to ethical questions.
Maybe his exaggeration was due to the fact that his addressee
was not a philosopher, but a literary publicist, indeed one whom
Wittgenstein was trying to persuade to publish his book. One
could even argue that the ethical ending of the book is parasitic on
the main part dealing with logic, since he develops the distinction
between saying and showing in the main part and then makes use
of it in the passages on ethics. And indeed, when he wrote in the

85
same year to a very different addressee, namely Russell, he empha-
sized that the main point of the book

is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions – i.e. by

language – (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought)
and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown
(gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.9

In conclusion, we could understand the logical part very well

without the ethical one, but not vice versa. Wittgenstein’s work
had indeed extended from the foundations of logic to the nature
of the world, and further to mysticism, but only in this order.

86
 5

The Wilderness Years, 1918–29

The Tractatus was a highly original book, both in content and in

form, and the author knew this. As soon as he finished the type-
script in summer 1918, Wittgenstein submitted it to Jahoda and
Siegel, the Viennese publishers of Kraus’s journal Die Fackel, but it
was rejected. A series of disappointing negotiations with several
publishers ensued, including Braumüller in Vienna, who had pub-
lished Weininger; Insel Verlag, the German publisher of Rilke, and
von Ficker’s journal Der Brenner. He even contacted a now forgotten
philosophy journal, but when asked to transform the text into a
more conventional format, Wittgenstein withdrew his offer. In
these negotiations he received support from people like Russell,
Frege, Rilke, but it was all to no avail. The value of the book escaped
publishers and they thought it was too risky to publish a totally
unknown author. One offer, for instance, by Braumüller, made the
publication of the Tractatus conditional on Wittgenstein agreeing to
cover the costs of paper and printing. Wittgenstein refused, saying

I think it’s not decent behaviour, from a social point of view,

to force a book onto the world (of which the publisher is a part)
in this way. My job was to write the book: its acceptance by the
world must proceed in a normal fashion.1

The great difficulties he encountered in this affair left him most

embittered. ‘I don’t know where I can get my work accepted either.

87
If I were only somewhere else than in this shitty world!’ he wrote
to von Ficker. The content of the book appeared not only to be
unsayable, but even unprintable. By 1920, after yet another
rejection, he had become so disillusioned that he wrote to Russell
saying that he was giving up, leaving the manuscript to Russell to
do with as he pleased. Russell commissioned one of his former
pupils, the mathematician Dorothy Wrinch, to see to the
publication of the book. After one last rejection, this time by
Cambridge University Press, she approached several German
journals and received a particularly positive reply from Annalen der
Naturphilosophie, a journal now largely remembered because the
Tractatus appeared there for the first time. As the journal’s editor
made clear to Wrinch, the typescript was accepted only because it
was accompanied by a lengthy and sympathetic introduction by
Russell, a celebrity by any estimate. The Tractatus was thus finally
published in the first half of 1921, three years after its completion.
Ironically, the Annalen stopped its publication with the Tractatus,
as if to prove the point of the book’s last proposition. Wittgenstein,
who was not sent the proofs, disapproved of this first edition,
calling it a pirated version because of the many printing mistakes
concerning the logical notation. The Tractatus came out in a form
acceptable to him only in 1922, this time published by Routledge
and Kegan Paul, with an English translation accompanying the
German original. The translation, reviewed and improved by
Wittgenstein, was made by C. K. Ogden, a linguist, with assistance
by Frank Ramsey, one of the most promising British philosophers
of his generation.
For all its frustrating aspects, the publishing affair was only the
first of many difficulties Wittgenstein would encounter in his post-
war life. At the end of the war we find him in an Italian prisoner-of-
war camp near Como. He remained in captivity for another eight
months and was transferred to a camp in Cassino in January 1919.
Naturally, circumstances in these camps were very different from

88
those in the trenches. There was much idle time to kill, for instance
through concerts, lectures, discussions, even exhibitions that the
captives would organize. Wittgenstein participated in this camp
life and established friendships with the sculptor Michael Drobil,
the writer Franz Parak and the teacher Ludwig Hänsel. With the
latter Wittgenstein discussed logic and read Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. They were to remain lifelong friends. Parak has provided us
with the following description of Wittgenstein in the camp:

He had a thin face and a noble profile, was of middle height . . .

the really striking thing about him was his manner of speaking:
it conveyed an extraordinary definiteness. There was a charac-
teristic movement of his head too: usually it was bowed, but
from time to time he would throw it back and direct his gaze
into the distance.2

Reminding him of his time in Olmütz, these acquaintances pro-

vided Wittgenstein with some relief after the strain of the war.
But they did not relieve him of his inner tensions and conflicts,
which were no longer overshadowed by the much greater dangers
of warfare. Indeed, if anything, under the burden of his recent
experiences he had become even less capable of leading a normal
life. Not unlike many of his generation who had witnessed the
catastrophe of the ‘Great War’, only more intensely so, adapta-
tion to civilian life was painful for him. The years in the army
had fundamentally changed him. They had triggered a religious
awakening and the desire to live a Tolstoyan life devoted to
simple people. His lifestyle was now frugal and it would stay so
for the rest of his life. He dressed in the simplest way possible,
often wearing his old uniform, rejecting altogether the role of the
wealthy young man before the war. He could not see any purpose
for himself in the high society he originated from. Since he
believed himself to have solved the problems of philosophy, the

89
mediocrity of an academic career did not appeal to him. On his
return from captivity, in August 1919, he decided to dispose of the
fortune inherited from his father and did so immediately by dis-
tributing it among his sisters and brother, much to the dismay of
his financial adviser, who considered this simply an act of suicide.
According to Parak he briefly contemplated becoming a priest.3
But the compromises of institutionalized religion were still unac-
ceptable to him. Thus he settled for becoming a primary school
teacher, because as a teacher he could ‘read the gospel with the
children’.4 His family was not pleased with this decision and felt
that Ludwig was wasting his talent on a mediocre profession – we
can imagine how much less pleased his father Karl would have
been, had he been alive. As Hermine put it: it was as if one used a
precision tool to open a packing case! But Wittgenstein felt that
he was not understood, as a striking simile in a reply to Hermine
indicates: ‘You remind me of someone looking through a window
who can’t make sense of the strange movements of a passer-by
outside. He has no idea of the violence of the storm outside nor
of the difficulty the other has simply in staying on his feet.’5
So in September 1919 he enrolled in a teacher’s training college
in Vienna, and at the end of the course in July 1920 the man whom
Russell had expected before the war to make the next big step in
philosophy was a certified primary school teacher. The course itself
was easy. Given his educational background, he was respected by
the college faculty and was spared most academic subjects. But the
experience of sitting in a schoolroom again was actually very
humiliating. ‘The benches are full of boys of 17 and 18 and I’ve
reached 30. That leads to some very funny situations – and many
very unpleasant ones too! I often feel miserable.’6 As in Linz or on
the Goplana he felt once again ostracized, although this time his
misery was self-inflicted.
The period was generally one of great depression, causing him
to contemplate suicide once more. He felt not at ease with himself,

90
being in a ‘terrible state of mind’ and having ‘no faith’, as he
described it in letters to Paul Engelmann:

I feel like completely emptying myself again; I have had a most

miserable time lately. Of course only as a result of my own base-
ness and rottenness. I have continually thought of taking my
own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to
the lowest point. May you never experience this.7

Exactly why he thought so little of himself is not clear, even if we

take into account the humiliation in the college and the trouble of
finding a publisher for the Tractatus.8 There were also the pressures
from his family, whom he tried to keep at arm’s length by moving
out of the aristocratic lodgings and into a flat, and, more impor-
tantly, the feeling that his philosophical work was not understood
by anybody. He had sent copies of the book to Frege and Russell,
the two most able contemporary philosophers in his eyes. Frege
sent him some comments and questions of clarification concerning
the opening pages of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein was very disap-
pointed by these, as he felt Frege had no understanding of the deep
issues in the book. For similar reasons he was not happy with
Russell’s feedback either. Russell, who was very enthusiastic about
the book, agreed to meet Wittgenstein in The Hague during the
Christmas vacation of 1919 to have Wittgenstein explain the book
to him. Since Wittgenstein was now without money and in need of
funding for the trip, he asked Russell to sell the belongings he had
left in Cambridge, including the expensive furniture he had bought
in 1913, a deal that was carried out to the financial advantage of
Russell. Wittgenstein also asked Russell to burn all his Cambridge
diaries and manuscripts. Soon after the meeting Russell wrote his
introduction to the Tractatus, but Wittgenstein was so disappointed
by his former teacher’s apparent lack of understanding that he
initially decided against publishing the book at all rather than have

91
The veteran: Wittgenstein in the early post-war years.

it appear with such a preface. Fortunately, Russell took this

rejection lightly and resumed his efforts to find a publisher for
the Tractatus, with eventual success as discussed above.
Tormented by his inner demons, Wittgenstein finally fled the
metropolis and spent the summer of 1920 working as a gardener in
the Klosterneuburg monastery outside Vienna. To describe this

92
refuge as therapy would go too far, but it certainly had relaxing
effects on his battered soul. The gardening work was purely manual
and simple, but exhausting enough to distract him from plunging
into the ever-threatening inner abyss. One particular reason for his
overall depressive state can be gathered from a letter to Russell he
wrote from here: ‘Every day I think of Pinsent. He took half my life
away with him. The devil will take the other half.’9
In September 1920 Wittgenstein was offered a position as
a teacher in a prosperous town near Vienna, which he rejected
because it had ‘a park with a fountain’ and was thus not rural
enough for his taste. Instead, he settled for Trattenbach in the
mountains of Lower Austria, a poor and remote village. One might
think that he now had a chance to realize his Tolstoyan ideal and
thus actually become happy. But his six years as a schoolteacher in
Austria (1920–26) were overall of little joy and self-realization. This
was in part due to Tolstoy’s ill-conceived romantic ideal of serving
the so-called simple people, an ideal that has exerted a seductive
power on many modern intellectuals. Wittgenstein was not
immune to it. In addition, his friend Hänsel encouraged him to
join the Reform School Movement that was taking shape within
a wider social reform in post-war Austria. Although Wittgenstein
was not an explicit advocate of this movement (in contrast to, say,
the philosopher and later opponent Karl Popper, who was also a
schoolteacher in Austria during the same period), he was not
opposed to the movement’s focus on new techniques of teaching,
in particular the focus on learning by doing instead of learning by
drilling. Wittgenstein intended to ‘better’ simple people by teach-
ing them mathematics, the German classics and the Bible, proba-
bly a far too idealistic project, ignoring the real-life concerns of
rural people. Additional handicaps that doomed the experiment
from the outset were Wittgenstein’s irascible character and his
wealthy origin. He was soon revolted by the peasant society in
which he found himself, and the dislike was reciprocated.

93
 Initially, however, Wittgenstein was rather pleased with his new
home, describing it as beautiful and tiny. To Russell, who was guest
lecturing through China at the time, he wrote: ‘It must be the first
time that the schoolmaster at Trattenbach has ever corresponded
with a professor in Peking.’10 Friends like Hänsel, Drobil and
Sjögren visited him at weekends, contributing to his improving
mood. He also befriended the local priest, Alois Neururer, to whom
he read aloud Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As for his
pupils, he managed to fascinate them, at least initially. His teaching
methods were unconventional. Instead of forcing them to learn
something by heart, he tried to raise their interest about a problem
and motivate them to find out the correct solution by themselves.
The greatest successes were achieved when he could take advantage
of his various skills, teaching them how to build a steam engine or
a tower, draw human figures in motion, assemble a cat’s skeleton,
identify the architectural style of buildings during a trip to Vienna,
etc. His sister Hermine witnessed her brother in action:

The interest that he aroused was enormous. Even the ungifted

and usually inattentive among the boys came up with astonish-
ingly good answers, and they were positively climbing over each
other in their eagerness to be given a chance to answer or to
demonstrate a point.11

In one case, his engineering skills even helped him earn some
recognition from the villagers. This was when, after failed attempts
by several engineers, Wittgenstein managed to repair the engine
in the local textile factory simply by directing four workers each
to hit a particular spot with a hammer in the order dictated by
and comprehensible only to him. This incident became something
of a legend in Trattenbach and was referred to as a ‘miracle’.
Unfortunately, however, such successes did not suffice to gain
the trust of the villagers. He was viewed as an awkward stranger, a

94
‘rich baron’ visited by wealthy people from Vienna. They found his
decision to live in their community baffling. Their opinion wors-
ened when Wittgenstein began to show weaknesses in his teaching.
He demanded high standards from his pupils and was willing to
give them time and attention without stint if they seemed promis-
ing. With the best pupils, who revered him, he even arranged extra
tuition. But he showed much less patience with weak students.
Since he was irascible and believed in the effectiveness of corporal
punishment, contrary to the doctrines of the Reform Movement,
he often hit his pupils for misbehaviour, but often also for what
seemed to him to be stupidity. This was especially the case if they
were girls and failed in his beloved subject, mathematics, taught
not only for two hours every morning, but also at a level higher
than required by the curriculum.12 He was soon feared by his
pupils, disliked by their parents and disapproved of by his
colleagues. Here is a vivid recollection by one of his victims:

During the arithmetic lesson we that had algebra had to sit in

the first row. My friend Anna Völkerer and I one day decided
not to give any answers. Wittgenstein asked: ‘What do you
have?’ To the question what is three times six Anna said: ‘I don’t
know.’ He asked me how many metres are there in a kilometre.
I said nothing and received a box on my ears. Later Wittgenstein
said: ‘If you don’t know I will take a child from the youngest
class in the school who will know.’ After the lesson Wittgenstein
took me into the office and asked: ‘Is it that you don’t want to
or is it that you can’t?’ I said ‘Yes, I want to.’ Wittgenstein said
to me: ‘You are a good student, but as for arithmetic . . . Or are
you ill? Do you have a headache?’ Then I lied, ‘Yes!’ ‘Then’, said
Wittgenstein, ‘please, please Brenner, can you forgive me?’
While he said this he held up his hands in prayer. I immediately
felt my lie to be a great disgrace.13

95
The schoolteacher and his pupils: Wittgenstein and schoolchildren in Puchberg am
Schneeberg, Austria.

There were similar incidents. Wittgenstein sometimes regretted

his outbursts and at least in one case he went to the house of a
pupil to ask for her forgiveness. But one cannot really feel sorry
for Wittgenstein in this context. He was inflicting futile pain on
children for not mastering his venerated discipline, of little use to
them in their social context. His rueful reflections on his failures
did not lead to the only acceptable conclusion: to change his teach-
ing methods, indeed his whole attitude to teaching at a primary
school. Instead, he was inclined to view the lack of success in his
new profession as a sign of the primitiveness of the villagers and,
no less important, his longstanding moral flaws. Thus, in early 1921
he wrote to Engelmann:

I have been morally dead for more than a year! . . . I am one of

those cases which perhaps are not all that rare today: I had a
task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I
ought to have done something positive with my life, to have
become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on
earth, and now I am gradually fading out. My life has really

96
 become meaningless and so it consists only of futile episodes.
The people around me do not notice this and would not under-
stand; but I know that I have a fundamental deficiency.14

The summer vacation of 1921 Wittgenstein spent in Norway

with Arvid Sjögren, finally seeing again the house he had built in
1913. His companion’s family were close friends of the Wittgensteins.
Ludwig had made friends with Arvid while he had lodged with the
Sjögrens in Vienna during his teaching course. Arvid, the future
husband of Ludwig’s niece Clara, was a big and gruff young man
who regarded Wittgenstein as his mentor and who followed the
latter’s advice to become a mechanic instead of going to university.
Wittgenstein gave similar, not unproblematic, advice several times
later. Arvid was, as Monk suggests, Wittgenstein’s first disciple,
with many more to come.15
The following school year Wittgenstein was back in Trattenbach,
but due to his growing difficulties he was transferred a year later, in
September 1922, to a secondary school in another village, Hassbach.
However, he disliked the new environment as well, finding the
pretentiousness of his colleagues, whom he described as being
‘not human at all but loathsome worms’, unbearable. In November
he transferred to a different village, Puchberg, which was also in
the mountains. Although his current life was far removed from
philosophy, in this year he spent considerable time revising the
English translation of the Tractatus.
The year 1922 also saw the final break-up of the friendship with
Russell. They had decided to meet in Innsbruck in August and due
to the many tourists profiting from the inflation in Austria they
were forced to share a hotel room. Russell’s wife Dora, who was
accompanying her husband, witnessed no open quarrel, but the
differences were deep. While Russell was now in favour of social-
ism, a staunch atheist and libertarian about sex, Wittgenstein was
at the height of his religious ardour, leading a chaste and apolitical

97
life. Russell, who had by now given up theoretical philosophy
and was, through popular lectures and writings on politics and
ethics, in the course of becoming the famous public intellectual
as which he is still known, was partly amused, partly repelled by
Wittgenstein’s attempts to convince him ‘with great earnestness
that it is better to be good than clever’.16 Wittgenstein, on the other
hand, must have been repelled by what he considered to be a frivo-
lous lifestyle on the part of Russell. Shocked by the disaster of the
war, Russell believed in the urgency of changing the world, while
Wittgenstein was more introverted, seeking primarily to change
himself. When Heinrich Postl, a local coalminer from Puchberg,
expressed his wish to improve the world, Wittgenstein replied:
‘Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better
the world.’ In short, crucial things separated Russell and
Wittgenstein. Whether it was Wittgenstein or Russell who broke
off the contact is not entirely clear, although the evidence suggests
it was Russell, since he did not reply to Wittgenstein’s subsequent
letters. In any case, the clash produced by these different ethical
outlooks was definitive: they were never again to address each
other as friends, but only as colleagues. Years later Wittgenstein
is reported to have said apropos of Russell’s ethical writings,
in particular those on marriage and free love:

If a person tells me he has been at the worst places I have no

right to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom
that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud. . . .
Russell’s books should be bound in two colours, those dealing
with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy
should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue
– and no one should be allowed to read them.17

Wittgenstein spent two years in the village of Puchberg and they

were similar to those in Trattenbach, save for his friendship with

98
Postl and Rudolf Koder, a gifted pianist with whom he could play
music, preferably Brahms. One other welcome digression was the
visit of his English translator Frank Ramsey in September 1923.
There could hardly have been a more suited discussion partner
for Wittgenstein. Ramsey was the most able young philosopher
in Cambridge and author of an insightful, if critical, review of the
Tractatus. He stayed for two weeks in Puchberg, during which they
spent several hours every day reading and discussing the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein even made some corrections to both the English
and the German versions of his book following these discussions.
Ramsey much admired Wittgenstein. He wrote in 1924 to his
mother: ‘We really live in a great time for thinking, with Einstein,
Freud and Wittgenstein all alive, and all in Germany or Austria,
those foes of civilisation!’ From Ramsey’s point of view
Wittgenstein’s schoolteacher career was, as he wrote to Keynes,
a ‘ridiculous waste of his energy and brain’. Together with Keynes
Ramsey tried to convince Wittgenstein to come back to Cambridge
and continue philosophy. Keynes offered to fund his trip, while
Ramsey enquired about Wittgenstein’s formal requirements for
obtaining a phd. But it was to no avail.

He says he himself will do nothing more, not because he is

bored, but because his mind is no longer flexible. He says no one
can do more than 5 or 10 years work at philosophy. (His book
took 7.) And he is sure that Russell will do nothing more impor-
tant. . . . He is very poor . . . He has one tiny room whitewashed,
containing a bed, washstand, small table and one hard chair and
that is all there is room for. His evening meal, which I shared last
night, is rather unpleasant coarse bread, butter and cocoa.18

The contrast between this lifestyle and that of the rest of

Wittgenstein’s family, whom Ramsey visited a few months later,
could not have been greater. In Vienna Ramsey witnessed the

99
 Wittgenstein’s
philosopher friend
Frank Ramsey,
who died at a
tragically young
age.

incredible wealth of Wittgenstein’s family, for instance when he

attended a party organized by Ludwig’s sister Margarete in her
lodgings, the Schönborn Palace. Ramsey also witnessed the worries
of the family, who desired so much to get the prodigal son out
of the wilderness, a desire that was frustrated by the fact that
he rejected any kind of help they were offering. Having some
interest in psychoanalysis, Ramsey ventured an explanation
for Wittgenstein’s state of mind: the ‘terribly strict upbringing.
Three of his brothers committed suicide – they were made to work
so hard by their father: at one time the eight children had twenty-
six private tutors; and their mother took no interest in them.’
Although Wittgenstein refused to return to Cambridge,
Ramsey’s visit refreshed his connections with England, which
eventually led him to visit some of his English friends in 1925.
Meanwhile, his life in the wilderness continued. In September
1924 he transferred to the primary school in Otterthal, a village
close to Trattenbach and equally poor. These villages, and the
town of Kirchberg, the district’s capital, have now become almost

100
pilgrimage locations. Philosophical symposia, attended by
Wittgenstein experts from all over the world, take place every
summer in Kirchberg. One can trace Wittgenstein’s steps by
following designated paths which are marked by quotes from
the Tractatus at intervals. And with some luck one can still meet a
village elder who can remember Wittgenstein. In any case, it was
here that Wittgenstein’s teaching career ended in an ungraceful
manner in April 1926. Once again he was not in control of himself
in class and hit a boy on the head several times. The boy, who was
of weak health, collapsed. Wittgenstein called in panic for a doctor
and then left the school in a hurry. There was a public hearing of
the case, apparently at his own request, but Wittgenstein was
acquitted, partly because he lied about the extent to which he had
applied corporal punishment in his classes.19 Humiliated and
morally defeated, he decided to give up teaching for good.
There has been some speculation that despite its sorry ending,
Wittgenstein’s career as a schoolteacher was of great significance
for his philosophical development. Indeed, it is claimed that his
time as a teacher is visible on almost every page of his Philosophical
Investigations.20 However, although there are several passages
discussing infant language acquisition in his later book, this claim is
widely exaggerated. Nevertheless, there remains the possibility that
the teaching experience shifted his focus away from the abstract,
mathematical approach to language of Frege and Russell toward
the more down-to-earth and applied aspects of language as they
characteristically arise in the teaching of children. Paul Engelmann
has suggested that the experience of teaching is reflected in the less
sibylline and more unassuming style of Wittgenstein’s later writings.

When this man, who until then – for all the depth of his insight
into the essence of life and humanity – had been frighteningly
unworldly and hopelessly foreign to human society, was sud-
denly brought face to face with its grisly reality, he was luckily
also brought into direct contact with children.21

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 Be this as it may, there is one more palpable result of his teaching
experience. Wishing to improve his pupils’ spelling, Wittgenstein
considered introducing dictionaries in his classes, but realized that
the ones available on the market were too expensive. Thus he set
out to write a short and affordable spelling dictionary for primary
schools, partly based on spelling lists he compiled with his pupils.
The dictionary, which was tailored to the needs of primary schools
and even reflected some peculiarities of the local dialect, proved
very effective and quickly improved the children’s spelling. It was
the second, and last, book Wittgenstein would publish in his life-
time.22 The 40-page dictionary appeared in 1926 and had a notable
circulation, but was not a commercial success and therefore was
not reprinted. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable attempt by
Wittgenstein and proof of how seriously he approached any field
of activity. It is almost comical that he has been portrayed recently
as a dyslexic and that aspects of his philosophical work have been
attributed to this alleged disability.23 A dyslexic who wrote a
spelling dictionary?
His lack of success as a teacher greatly depressed Wittgenstein
and gave him, once again, the feeling that there was no Sitz im
Leben, no place for him in this world. He contemplated again the
possibility of becoming a monk, but was told that this was not the
right motive for joining monastic life. Instead he started working as
a gardener for the monks in Hütteldorf outside Vienna, living there
for three months in almost hermitic conditions in a shed in the gar-
den of the monastery. Despite appearances, this episode marked the
beginning of his gradual return to society. In June 1926 his mother
died in Vienna. This event seems to have overcome his estrange-
ment with the family, which dated back to at least 1913, when his
father died.24 Wittgenstein began now to participate enthusiastically
in family life. Moreover, he was given the ideal opportunity to inte-
grate fully with society when his sister Margarete commissioned
Paul Engelmann to design and build a mansion for her in the

102
Kundmanngasse in Vienna. Spurred on by an interest in architec-
ture and the artistic ideals he shared with Engelmann, Wittgenstein
accepted an invitation to join the project. Although Engelmann had
already largely designed the plan of the building, Wittgenstein soon
dominated the actual building process, making several changes to
the building, especially the interiors.
This new task, which occupied him until the end of 1928, was
taken very seriously by Wittgenstein. Indeed, he saw it as his new
vocation. Despite having no diploma, he was listed in the city
directory as a professional architect, and his letters bore the
letterhead ‘Paul Engelmann & Ludwig Wittgenstein Architects’.
Under Wittgenstein’s careful eye, the doors and door handles
were all made entirely of metal and designed according to strict
mathematical relations referring to the dimensions of the rooms.
The design also reflected Wittgenstein’s hermitic lifestyle: bulbs
were supposed to hang naked from the ceiling, and small, l-shaped
radiators, which took a year to produce and were placed discreetly
in the corners, remained unpainted. Every piece was uniquely
crafted, in stark contrast to modern mass production.25 There
were also technical innovations, such as 150-kilogram metal
screens that replaced curtains and could be lowered effortlessly
to the floor. Wittgenstein’s attention to detail was so fanatical
that just when everybody thought the building was finished,
he ordered the workers to raise the ceiling of one of the big rooms
by 30 millimetres to satisfy his desired proportions. He was asked
by a worker: ‘Tell me, Herr Ingenieur, does a millimetre here or
there really matter so much to you?’ To which Herr Ingenieur
thundered ‘Yes!’26 Needless to say there were other occasions on
which he drove the builders to despair.
Being of plain shape and having no external decoration, it may
seem obvious to say that the house strictly followed, indeed radical-
ized, Loos’s rejection of any ornament. It has also been compared to
buildings in the Bauhaus style. However, recent interpretations have

103
The house Wittgenstein designed for his sister Margarete in Kundmangasse,
Vienna.

denied that the house is Loosian or Bauhausian.27 It was not built

according to the principles of Bauhaus functionalism, and the
Wittgensteins, including Ludwig, had distanced themselves from
Loos by the 1920s. Instead, it must be seen as a unique statement
made by Wittgenstein, embodying absolute precision as a design
principle and thus the spirit of the Tractatus. Hermine Wittgenstein,
who admired its perfection and monumentality, could not see
herself living in it, describing it as ‘house embodied logic’ and ‘a
dwelling for the gods’. Wittgenstein himself saw this lack of life as
a specific deficiency, as he wrote later about his house:

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. Not, e.g.,
in Mendelssohn. All great art has primitive human drives as its
ground bass. They are not the melody (as they are, perhaps, in
Wagner), but they are what gives the melody depth & power. In
this sense one may call Mendelssohn a ‘reproductive’ artist. – In
the same sense: my house for Gretl is the product of a decidedly

104
 sensitive ear, good manners, the expression of great understand-
ing (for a culture, etc.). But primordial life, wild life striving to
erupt into the open – is lacking. And so you might say, health is
lacking (Kierkegaard). (Hothouse plant.)28

Some interpreters have claimed that the building exemplifies certain

doctrines of the Tractatus, such as the showing–saying distinction.
For, as we can read in a contemporary guide, in building this house
Wittgenstein ‘drew a clear demarcation between the effable and
the ineffable as well, namely by stripping the syntax of classical
architecture of all rhetoric and bringing it back to the point of
origin where one can see it “sub specie aeternitatis”’.29
There is, however, a danger of exaggerating Wittgenstein’s con-
tribution to the house. First, too much is made of the parallel with
his philosophy. Wittgenstein himself never claimed such a parallel.
The formal-aesthetic similarities between his philosophical writings
and his architectural project share a common source, namely cer-
tain aesthetic preferences, but nothing else. It is false to explain the
Tractatus saying–showing distinction in terms of ‘stripping the syn-
tax of all rhetoric’. While the style of the Tractatus may indeed be
seen as stripped of rhetoric, the theory of syntax has nothing to do
with rhetoric. It is a complex philosophical doctrine and, whether
true or not, could be expressed in other ways. Second, Wittgenstein’s
cultural models should not be underestimated. His later personal
disapproval of Loos does not nullify the latter’s influence. The influ-
ence of Weininger and Kraus lies in the background as well. Third,
Engelmann’s contribution, namely the ground plan, should not
be ignored. Although Engelmann later wrote that he considered
Wittgenstein the chief architect, this overly modest claim is likely to
have reflected his deep admiration for Wittgenstein. Finally, we have
Margarete’s voice, which had much weight and which, given her
latent traditionalism, counterbalanced Ludwig’s austerity. This trad-
itionalism revealed itself in her choice to have her mansion imitate

105
the room distribution of the Palais Wittgenstein, to have an entry
hall and haute-bourgeois furnishings, such as carpets, curtains,
Rococo chairs, statues, Chinese vases and plants.30 It is telling that
despite this Stilbruch there was no disagreement between the sib-
lings. Two years before his death, Wittgenstein wrote to his sister,
‘Yesterday I thought . . . of the Kundmanngasse house and how
delightfully you furnished it and how comforting. In these matters
we understand each other.’31
After the Second World War the house went through a troubled
history, including its partial devastation by Soviet soldiers, who
used it as barracks in 1945. In the 1970s it was saved in the last
moment from demolition and declared a national monument. In
1975 Communist Bulgaria bought it and turned it into a cultural
centre. It can be visited today, although little of the original interior
remains. Ironically, it stands not far away from the more famous
Hundertwasser House, which, with its biomorphic and colourful
design, could not be more diametrically opposed to Wittgenstein’s
architecture. Hundertwasser rejected even the idea of a straight
line, calling it ‘the devil’s tool’. One wonders how an encounter
between Wittgenstein and Hundertwasser would have turned out.
Not long after completing the house, Wittgenstein’s and
Engelmann’s friendship deteriorated. The reasons for this are a
matter of speculation, but one plausible explanation is that in 1928
Wittgenstein was introduced to a wealthy young Swiss woman
and art student, Marguerite Respinger, who had an aversion to
Engelmann. Respinger was a friend of the family and Wittgenstein
courted her for around three years – his only heterosexual
relationship that we know of. The nature of the relationship was
peculiar, given their remarkable differences. Marguerite was almost
half Ludwig’s age and had no interest in philosophy and spiritual
matters, but rather in an entertaining lifestyle. Their only common
interest was art. Nevertheless, encouraged by Margarete, who saw
in Marguerite’s indifferent attitude to intellectual matters precisely

106
the distraction needed for her brother’s tortured mind, they began
dating, meeting almost daily for the cinema or in some Viennese
café. Wittgenstein even sculpted a bust inspired by her in the
studio of his friend Michael Drobil, in whose work he took a
critical interest. Wittgenstein has sometimes been portrayed as a
homosexual, but judging from his relationship with Marguerite
this may be not entirely accurate. Not only did they kiss, but his
diaries from this period show that Ludwig was clearly in love with
Marguerite, taking the relationship very seriously, probably more
so than she.

I love Marguerite very much & am very anxious that she might
not be healthy since I haven’t gotten a letter from her in more
than a week. When I am alone I think of her again & again but
at other times too. Were I more decent, my love for her would
be more decent too. And yet I love her now as tenderly as I can.32

I am very much in love with R., have been for a long time of
course, but it is especially strong now. And yet I know that the
matter is in all probability hopeless. That is, I must be braced
that she might get engaged & married any moment. And I know
that this will be very painful for me. I therefore know that I
should not hang my whole weight on this rope since I know
that eventually it will give. That is I should remain standing
with both feet on firm ground & only hold the rope but not
hang on it. But that is difficult. It is difficult to love so unselfishly
that one holds on to love & does not want to be held by it.33

Marriage was seriously considered, but both expected very

different things from it. Ludwig envisaged marriage as a spiritual,
maybe even celibate communion (not unlike Kafka with his Felice,
although for very different reasons) and did not want to have
children, since he considered it irresponsible to give life to a person

107
Two significant women in Wittgenstein’s life: Marguerite Respinger and Margarete
Stonborough, 1931.

in this world of misery. Marguerite certainly wanted children.

When she visited him in Norway in 1931, his behaviour towards
her brought out these differences in such a drastic manner that
she decided he would be the last man on earth she would want to
marry. To begin with, Ludwig arranged that they live in different
houses. He spent little time with her, instead reading the Bible,

108
praying and preparing mentally for the holy act of marriage. She
on the other hand went swimming, took walks, socialized with
the villagers, and ignored the copy of the Bible he had slipped into
her luggage.34 How could they ever have lived up to each other’s
expectations? After two weeks she left Norway disenchanted and
that was the end of the relationship. But they stayed good friends.
In 1933 Marguerite married one of the Sjögrens, a decision
Wittgenstein was very unhappy with, but which he came to accept.
Marguerite wrote later in her memoirs:

Ludwig came to see me . . . an hour before my wedding. ‘You

are taking a boat, the sea will be rough, remain always attached
to me so that you don’t capsize’, he said to me. Until that very
moment I had not realized his deep attachment nor perhaps his
great deception. For years I have been like soft putty in his hands
which he had worked to shape into a better being. He had been
like a Samaritan who gives new life to someone who is failing.35

As good as Wittgenstein’s intentions might have been toward

Respinger, her influence on him seems to have been more nefarious.
We have no clear evidence of her anti-Semitism, but we do know
that Respinger disliked Engelmann because he was ‘the sort of Jew
one didn’t like’.36 It was during his time with her that Wittgenstein,
at least temporarily, revised his views on his Jewishness and Jews in
general, and we find remarks about this topic in his diary around
1931. As Ray Monk has pointed out, if they had not been written by
Wittgenstein, we could understand these remarks as the rantings
of an anti-Semite.37 Jews are described as having a ‘secretive and
cunning nature’ that is independent of their long persecution.
Wittgenstein comments on the traditional anti-Semitic compari-
son of Jews with a tumour in the body of European civilization
without any disapproval, and he describes the Jews as merely
reproductive, unable genuinely to create anything, ‘even the tiniest

109
flower or blade of grass’. Finally, he applies this cliché to himself,
writing (note, incidentally, the interesting list of influences):

The saint is the only Jewish ‘genius’. Even the greatest Jewish
thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.) I think
there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive
in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking
but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have
done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clari-
fication. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege,
Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced
me . . . It is typical of the Jewish mind to understand someone’s
else work better than he understands it himself.38

Not all his diary notes on Jews display this negative attitude.
For instance, Wittgenstein also writes: ‘The Jew is a desert region,
but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit
and intellect.’39 Nevertheless, what surprises one about all these
passages is his readiness to make sweeping remarks about ‘the Jew’.
It contrasts sharply with the much more critical attitude towards
this kind of talk that he himself displayed in later years. Norman
Malcolm reports that when in 1939 he remarked to Wittgenstein
that the British national character was incompatible with plotting
a bomb against Hitler (as rumour had it at the time), Wittgenstein
was so outraged that he stopped seeing his friend for a while. Even
after five years he remained shocked by the primitiveness of
Malcolm’s remark:

what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for

you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some
abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your
thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it
does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist.40

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This critique could also have been levied against Wittgenstein’s
1931 remarks on Jews. One possible explanation for those remarks,
advanced by Monk, is that throughout his life Wittgenstein con-
stantly questioned and doubted himself, from both a philosophical
and a moral point of view, and that during that brief period under
Respinger’s spell he voiced his doubts in the language of anti-
Semitism.41 This is a plausible, if charitable interpretation of a man
who placed the independence of his judgements above everything
else. Note that even after 1931 Wittgenstein held an ambiguous atti-
tude to his Jewish origins – despite a cryptic remark to Maurice
Drury in 1949 that his thoughts are ‘one hundred percent Hebraic’.
Thus in his 1936 confession, presented to close friends and family
members, he admitted that he had let many people believe he was
only one-quarter Jewish. This proves not only that Wittgenstein
felt Jewish, but that he perceived Jewishness as a matter of shame
and concealment. After all, he had grown up in a virulently anti-
Semitic city, Karl Lueger’s Vienna, and it is implausible to assume
that this had no effect on his self-perception. To give just one
example, when young Ludwig wanted to join a gym in Vienna,
which was open only to ‘Aryans’, he was determined to lie about
his Jewish background in order to obtain membership until dis-
suaded by his brother Paul.42 A good way of concluding the matter
was offered by David Stern:

There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it

is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. But insofar as
he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the anti-
Semitic prejudices of his time. It would have been good if he
could have untangled those prejudices, but he did not do so.43

111
 6

Return to Cambridge and

Philosophy, 1929–39

Wittgenstein’s ‘wilderness’ years were not dedicated to philosophy,

although he maintained contacts with Russell and Ramsey. Since
he believed that he had solved all the problems of philosophy, what
he looked for after the completion of the Tractatus was a place in
life. With this he was only to a small degree successful. Wittgenstein
was born for philosophy and his renunciation of philosophy could
not be permanent. Other problems became temporally more
important, but philosophy always resurfaced as a necessity. ‘Art
alone . . . had not been enough for him on which to build a proper
life. But it was an indispensable part of the foundation of it.’1 Max
Brod’s words about Kafka could fit Wittgenstein just as well, if we
replace ‘art’ with ‘philosophy’. Unlike Rimbaud, for instance, who
completed his entire poetical oeuvre as a young man and then set-
tled for a different, more conventional life without literary ambi-
tions, Wittgenstein’s relation to philosophy is more comparable
to a comet, which is initially attracted by the sun, approaches it,
begins to glow, is then hurled away, and finally returns again, this
time glowing even more intensely.
During the years of his hermitic retreat the ‘egg’ that he had laid
with the Tractatus began to attract more and more attention, both
in Austria and abroad. Ramsey’s visit in 1923 was a consequence of
the immense interest the book sparked in Cambridge. Philosophers
closer to home were also keen to meet the author of the enigmatic
book. One such philosopher was Moritz Schlick, who from 1924

112
onwards headed a group of academics, mostly philosophers, but also
mathematicians, logicians and physicists, later known as the Vienna
Circle. Some of their most prominent members were Rudolf Carnap,
Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Gödel and
Friedrich Waismann. After the Nazis came to power, some of them
emigrated to the usa and had a major impact on the rise of analytic
philosophy there. What united them from the outset was a strictly
scientific world-view. They venerated natural science, epitomized by
modern physics, as the only way to gain knowledge about the world
and achieve social progress, and they rejected religion and the
metaphysical systems of traditional philosophy as unscientific and
irrational. As logical empiricists (or logical positivists) they believed
that all knowledge can be reduced to sensory experience and can be
given a precise formulation by means of logical analysis. They hugely
admired the Tractatus because in their view it had formulated the
programme for a strictly scientific method in philosophy for the first
time. In their manifesto of 1929, The Scientific Conception of the World:
The Vienna Circle, they hailed Einstein, Russell and Wittgenstein as
the main representatives of the scientific world-view. It seems that
the members of the Vienna Circle did not fully realize, or chose to
ignore, that the author of the Tractatus did not share their world-view
at all. He too believed that the statements of traditional metaphysics
were nonsensical, but not because there were no metaphysical
truths, rather because such truths were ineffable. His view was:
everything that can be said, can be said clearly, and we must pass
over the rest in silence. Their view was: everything that can be said,
can be said clearly, and there is nothing else. Moreover, Wittgenstein
did not share their belief in social progress by means of science. In
fact his view in this matter was diametrically opposed to the Vienna
Circle and more akin to the pessimism of Oswald Spengler’s The
Decline of the West, a book he read avidly in 1930. It was in this year
that he wrote a lengthy preface for a planned book, Philosophical
Remarks, in which he stated:

113
 This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the
spirit in which it is written. This spirit is, I believe, different
from that of the prevailing European and American civilization.
The spirit of this civilization the expression of which is the indus-
try, architecture, music, of present day fascism & socialism, is a
spirit that is alien & uncongenial to the author. . . . Even if it is
clear to me then that the disappearance of a culture does not
signify the disappearance of human value but simply of certain
means of expressing this value, still the fact remains that I con-
template the current of European civilization without sympathy,
without understanding its aims if any. So I am really writing for
friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.
It is all one to me whether the typical western scientist under-
stands or appreciates my work since in any case he does not
understand the spirit in which I write. Our civilization is charac-
terized by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form, it is not one
of its properties that it makes progress. Typically it constructs.
Its activity is to construct a more and more complicated struc-
ture. And even clarity is only a means to this end & not an end
in itself. – For me on the contrary clarity, transparency, is an
end in itself – I am not interested in erecting a building but in
having the foundations of possible buildings transparently
before me. – So I am aiming at something different than are
the scientists & my thoughts move differently than do theirs.2

Wittgenstein never gave up his distrust of progress. Towards

the end of his life he wrote:

It isn’t absurd . . . to believe that the age of science and technol-

ogy is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of
great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth
will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desir-
able about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it,

114
 is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not
how things are.3

In his opposition to a scientific civilization Wittgenstein was joined

by many other contemporary thinkers all over Europe, not only by
the above-mentioned Weininger and Spengler, but also José Ortega
y Gasset, Giovanni Gentile and Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, to
mention the most illustrious example, wrote at the time:

Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same:

the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the
rootless organization of the average man . . . The spiritual
decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in
danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that
makes it possible even to see the decline . . . the darkening of
the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth,
the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and
mistrust of everything creative and free.4

This distrust of modernity and science deeply separated Wittgenstein

from the Vienna Circle. Nevertheless, the logical positivists saw
in Wittgenstein their most important philosophical forerunner.
Schlick spent two years reading the Tractatus line by line with his
colleagues, and eventually resolved to meet the author himself.
Their attempts to contact Wittgenstein in his villages in the moun-
tains were initially unsuccessful and only in 1927, after Wittgenstein’s
return to Vienna, did they finally meet. Schlick persuaded him to
meet them on a regular basis, although, given his sensitivity and
frail state of mind, Schlick had to assure Wittgenstein that they
would not ask him any direct questions, indeed that they would not
even have to talk about philosophy. Ironically, these scientifically
minded philosophers were so much under Wittgenstein’s spell that
sometimes their meetings had the character of a session between a

115
guru and his disciples. He could talk and behave as he wanted –
and he did. Sometimes he talked about religion, art and ethics.
In one instance Wittgenstein turned his back to his audience and
recited poems by Rabindranath Tagore, hardly an exponent of the
scientific world-view! (Wittgenstein thought so highly of Tagore
that later he translated a part of a play by the Indian poet for
private use.) It was almost as if he was teaching them a lesson very
different from that of positivistic philosophy.
With time, however, valuable philosophical discussions devel-
oped between them, some of which were recorded by Waismann
and published as Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (1967). Most
of these discussions focused on themes from the Tractatus such as
the nature of language, logic, mathematics. But they also covered
metaphysical themes, which the Vienna Circle members abhorred.
Thus, he surprised his audience by expressing his sympathy
with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Heidegger, for
instance, wrote in his Being and Time (1927): ‘That in the face of
which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such . . . That in the
face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world . . .
the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety.’5
Sentences like these are according to the Tractatus pure nonsense,
and Rudolf Carnap, faithfully executing the programme of logical
analysis, famously ridiculed Heidegger for such philosophical prose
in an article in 1931. But Wittgenstein did not. For what Heidegger
was trying to say could not be said, but it was, contrary to Carnap’s
belief, the most essential matter.

I can imagine what Heidegger means by Being and anxiety.

Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language.
Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all
exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a
question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we
might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless

116
 we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw
that there is this running up against something and he referred
to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox).
This running up against the limits of language is ethics . . . But
the inclination, the running up against something, indicates
something. St Augustine knew that already when he said: What,
you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk
nonsense, it does not matter!6

In addition to these conversations, what gave Wittgenstein

the final reason to return to philosophy was a lecture given by
the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer in Vienna in March 1928.
Brouwer lectured on the foundations of mathematics and defended
his own view, intuitionism, which was opposed to Frege’s and
Russell’s logicism and Platonism. Brouwer argued that mathematics
is not a branch of logic and does not consist of truths about some
super-reality, which mathematicians discover (the way Columbus
discovered America). Instead, mathematics is a creation of the
human mind. Wittgenstein was much agitated after this lecture
and spent three hours in a café discussing it with two members
of the Vienna Circle. He sympathized with Brouwer’s critique of
logicism, but felt at the same time challenged by his views. It was
after Brouwer’s lecture that he resolved to return to Cambridge
and do philosophy again.
In January 1929 Wittgenstein was back in Cambridge, where he
was to stay, with short interruptions, for seven years. ‘Well, God
has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train’, Keynes wrote to a friend.
At almost 40, Wittgenstein was re-admitted as a student to Trinity
College and stayed in residence for the following two terms, having
Ramsey, who was fifteen years his junior, as his official supervisor.
Since he needed a degree in order to qualify for grants and academ-
ic jobs, he submitted the Tractatus as his phd thesis. As if this was
not unusual enough, in June he had a viva voce examination with

117
none other than Moore and Russell, the very philosophers to
whom he had explained and dictated parts of his book years ago.
Now the roles were reversed, if only formally. The situation was
described by Russell as the most absurd he ever experienced. The
exam started with a casual chat between the friends. After a while
Russell said to Moore: ‘Go on, you’ve got to ask him some ques-
tions – you’re the professor.’ Some discussion about the Tractatus
ensued, with Russell complaining about the supposed nonsensicality
of the propositions of the book. Eventually, Wittgenstein ended the
session by clapping his examiners’ shoulders and saying ‘Don’t
worry, I know you’ll never understand it.’7
Wittgenstein started working on philosophy almost immediately
after his arrival in Cambridge. He began to write down his
thoughts in the first of the eighteen large-format manuscript vol-
umes he was to complete by 1940, each amounting to 300 pages.
First he tried to execute the programme of the Tractatus, for example,
to determine what the postulated atomic objects might be. But he
failed in this, as he acknowledged himself in ‘Some Remarks on
Logical Form’, the only journal article he ever published, written in
July 1929. This failure prompted him to look increasingly critically
at his logical atomism and gradually to reject more and more of
his old ideas, until he finally discarded the whole conception of
language in the Tractatus and replaced it with a new one. This
conception was given its ultimate formulation in his masterwork,
the Philosophical Investigations, completed only in 1946 and published
posthumously (see chapter Eight). The years 1929–32 laid the
foundation for this new philosophy, although in this transitional
period we find him toying with all kinds of other ideas.
In Cambridge, as elsewhere, Wittgenstein was inclined to soli-
tude, although exchange with others was always vital for him, both
intellectually and psychologically. Fortunately, there were enough
brilliant minds around he could befriend. Russell was not teaching
in Cambridge any more, but Moore was. More importantly there

118
Wittgenstein’s
friend, the left-
wing Italian
economist
Piero Sraffa.

was Ramsey, who provided him with valuable critical feedback,

‘to a degree which I am hardly able to estimate’, as he later wrote
in the preface of the Philosophical Investigations. Unfortunately,
Ramsey died in January 1930 at the age of 26, a great loss for
Wittgenstein and for British philosophy. There was, however,
one disadvantage in the exchange with Ramsey: the latter was
more interested in the details of a theory, not in the bigger picture.
As Wittgenstein wrote a year after Ramsey’s death: ‘Ramsey was a
bourgeois thinker . . . He did not reflect on the essence of the state
. . . but on how this state might reasonably be organized. The idea
that this state might not be the only possible one partly disquieted
him and partly bored him.’8
A less ‘bourgeois’ and more ‘Bolshevist’ discussion partner was
Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), a gifted Italian economist who was lectur-
ing at King’s College. Sraffa was a Marxist and friend of Antonio

119
Gramsci. Despite not being a philosopher, he was not afraid of
challenging Wittgenstein head-on, unlike so many others. Indeed,
Wittgenstein acknowledged that during his discussions with
Sraffa he often felt like a tree robbed of its branches. Most of their
exchange was about philosophy, although Sraffa also informed
Wittgenstein, who disliked reading newspapers, about current
affairs. Sraffa was, unlike Ramsey, interested in the broader
picture and could help Wittgenstein see things in totally new ways.
A famous incident illustrating Sraffa’s impact on Wittgenstein
occurred when they were travelling by train and discussing logic.
Wittgenstein was defending the idea expressed in the Tractatus that
all propositions must be pictures and must have the same logical
form. In response to this Sraffa made the Neapolitan gesture of
contempt that consists of brushing the underneath of one’s chin
with the finger-tips and asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’
According to Wittgenstein, this incident broke the spell that had
seduced him to believe for so long that propositions must have a
uniform essence.9 Language is embedded in our ways of life and
does not have only one purpose or essence – an insight that
became part and parcel of his later philosophy. Sraffa and Ramsey
were the only two people who were mentioned and thanked in the
Preface of the Philosophical Investigations.
Another important Cambridge friend was J. M. Keynes, who
assisted in integrating Wittgenstein into the university’s social life
again, including the society of the Apostles, which he had left in
disgust in 1913. Through his Tractatus Wittgenstein had become in
the meantime a legendary figure and the Apostles were thrilled to
welcome him back. Equally, he came in touch with the Bloomsbury
group and possibly Virginia Woolf, although we find hardly any
references to each other in their writings.10 Wittgenstein, with all
his monkish tendencies, did not feel comfortable in these circles,
especially if women were present, in which case he chose not to
discuss any serious matter, but made shallow conversation and

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shallow jokes. He once walked out from a lunch because sex was
discussed in the company of women. Obviously he felt more at
home with individual people, especially young men, if they struck a
particular chord in him. A good example of this is Gilbert Pattison,
an undergraduate who later became a chartered accountant in
London. Pattison had no interest in philosophy or in tormenting
himself with ethical questions. Nevertheless, he was a close friend
of Wittgenstein for over ten years, since they shared a predilection
for trivia and ‘talking nonsense by the yard’. This involved watch-
ing Hollywood movies together at Leicester Square, ridiculing
advertisements in magazines and shops, and exchanging silly
letters, in which they would address each other with ‘Dear Blood’,
sign with ‘Yours bloodily’ and generally use the word ‘bloody’ ad
nauseam. Here is a typical exchange:

Dear Gilbert, . . . It might interest you to hear that I’ve had a

slight accident & broke a rib. I thought of having it removed &
of having a wife made of it, but they tell me that the art of making
women out of ribs has been lost. – Bloodily yours Ludwig

Dear Blood. I will be at Piccadilly Circus at 5-40 p.m. on

Thursday next, & I will also make all proper arrangements with
Major Lyons for Saturday. It is quite useless to experiment with
ribs unless they are the fifth (from the top). Were you playing
football or merely carousing? I recently received a tin of Messrs
Allenbury’s mixture from an anonymous benefactor. Yours etc
Gilbert11

Another Cambridge society whose meetings Wittgenstein

regularly attended, as before the war, was the Moral Science Club,
where he began to make younger friends and disciples. The sessions
of the society soon became dominated by the still youthful-looking
philosopher, so much so that some members of the older generation,

121
like C. D. Broad, Professor of Moral Philosophy, stopped their
attendance in protest against Wittgenstein regularly ‘going through
his hoops’ while his followers ‘wondered with a foolish look of
praise’.12 According to Monk, the reason why Wittgenstein chose
predominantly young men as his disciples and friends was the fact
that he preferred being surrounded by ‘childlike innocence and
first-class brains’ than by stiff professors.13 He was working on
what he considered a revolutionary conception of philosophy and
hoped that his new ideas would be better understood by the
younger generation. His charisma was overwhelming and left a
permanent mark on many of his pupils. As one of them, Desmond
Lee, has pointed out, Wittgenstein was in this respect similar to
Socrates; they both had a numbing and hypnotic effect on young
men.14 This effect was not always to the students’ benefit. He
demanded absolute loyalty and expected tolerance of his irascible
character, while he was in no way tolerant towards others. As Mary
Midgley puts it:

People who go about treading on other people’s toes are pecu-

liarly unaware of what it is like to be trodden on, so that they
are naturally much surprised when it happens to themselves . . .
Tolerance was not in Wittgenstein’s repertoire and he liked to
remove it from other people’s.15

Wittgenstein himself was not unaware of some of his flaws; he once

said to a friend: ‘Although I cannot give affection, I have a great need
for it.’ But was he also aware that his powerful personality could
distort that of others? Since he despised academia and romanticized
a ‘simple’ life, he convinced several students to give up their studies
and take up a practical profession, much to the dismay of their
parents. He even interfered in matters of life and death. Thus when
one of his closest friends and pupils, Maurice Drury, was about to
embark for d-Day in 1944, Wittgenstein gave him a piece of advice

122
that was based on his own attitude to death in the First World War:
‘If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting,
you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred.’ One may
wonder whether he had any right to use his authority in such an
irresponsible way. In all fairness, it should be mentioned that his
friends probably would have not accepted such criticism. Drury
himself has publicly disputed that Wittgenstein was a ‘rather can-
tankerous, arrogant, tormented genius’. On the contrary, for Drury
Wittgenstein was ‘the most warm-hearted, generous, and loyal
friend anyone could wish to have’.16
Another well-known Cambridge society was The Heretics.
Wittgenstein seems to have attended only one of its sessions, in
November 1929, but it was here that he presented what is his most
accessible text, ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (posthumously published). It is
also his only contribution to philosophical ethics, apart from the
remarks at the end of the Tractatus. In this lecture he tried to
counter the impression that he was a positivist and anti-religious
thinker, as many of his readers thought, by stressing again that
absolute values, for example, those that make an action such
as murder evil, are not facts in this world, but transcendent.
Consequently, there can be no science of ethics, since science deals
with facts in the world. Absolute values can only be experienced.
Any attempt to express them ends in nonsense. So far, so Tractatus.
Where the lecture goes beyond the book is to give a veritable
phenomenology of religious experience. He discusses three such
experiences, namely those summarized by the phrases ‘How extra-
ordinary that anything should exist’ (the wonder of the world), ‘I
am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’ (absolute safety)
and ‘God disapproves of our conduct’ (absolute guilt), but only to
demonstrate that these very phrases are meaningless. He writes:

We all know what it means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe

in my room, when I cannot be run over by an omnibus. I am

123
 safe if I have had whooping cough and cannot therefore get it
again. To be safe essentially means that it is physically impossi-
ble that certain things should happen to me and therefore it is
nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again this is
a misuse of the word ‘safe’ as the other example was of a misuse
of the word ‘existence’ or ‘wondering’.

And he concludes:

My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who

ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against
the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of
our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it
springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate
meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be
no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any
sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind
which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would
not for my life ridicule it.17

Despite his continuing dislike of academic life, Wittgenstein

decided to stay in Cambridge. However, since he was now without
any income, he faced financial difficulties. For the year 1929–30
he received, with the help of his friends, a grant to continue his
research and lecture on philosophical logic for two terms. When
this temporary arrangement came to an end, a more durable solution
had to be found. In the summer of 1930 he applied for a five-year
research fellowship at Trinity College. The work he submitted for
examination was a compilation of remarks from the manuscripts
he had completed to date (published as Philosophical Remarks in
1964), and was evaluated by Russell and the mathematicians J. E.
Littlewood and G. H. Hardy. Russell wrote in his recommendation:

124
A college
photograph of
Wittgenstein at
Cambridge.

The theories contained in the work of Wittgenstein are novel,

very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true,
I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should wish
to think that they are not, but from what I have read of them I
am quite sure that he should have an opportunity to work them
out, since when completed they may easily prove to constitute a
whole new philosophy.18

The fellowship was granted. It brought Wittgenstein great relief

and allowed him to focus on philosophy for a prolonged period.

125
 When asked by Richard Braithwaite under what title his first
lectures should be announced, Wittgenstein, after remaining silent
for a long while, finally replied that the subject would be philosophy.
‘What else can be the title of the lectures but Philosophy.’ This was
to remain the title of all his lectures in Cambridge, save those for
1932–3, which were announced as ‘Philosophy for Mathematicians’.
Wittgenstein’s ‘career’ as a lecturer lasted from 1930 to 1947, with the
exception of 1936–8 and some of the war years. In the course of these
years he lectured on a wealth of topics, including the nature of phil-
osophy, the philosophy of logic and language, the intentionality of
thought and language, the critique of metaphysics, solipsism and
idealism, the philosophy of mathematics, sense data and private
experience, cause and effect, aesthetics, religious belief and Freudian
psychology. Fortunately, extensive student notes of some of these
classes have survived. Wittgenstein’s lectures soon became legendary
and contributed to the aura of genius that already surrounded him.
Over the years many students and colleagues attended them, for
instance, Alice Ambrose, Elisabeth Anscombe, Max Black, Peter
Geach, Norman Malcolm, G. E. Moore, Iris Murdoch, Rush Rhees,
John Wisdom, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing,19 Georg Henrik von
Wright and many others. Several of his students were to become dis-
tinguished philosophers themselves, and it was through these pupils
that Wittgenstein’s new ideas were transmitted to the rest of Britain,
and to the usa, Australia and the Scandinavian lands.
When he started lecturing in 1929 Wittgenstein was concerned
that he had to switch from German to English, given that his manu-
scripts were all drafted in German, but this worry soon vanished,
as Wittgenstein spoke excellent English with no accent. His lectures
were informal and were quite unlike those in today’s universities.
They were held in his sparsely furnished rooms in Whewell’s Court
in Trinity College. But they made a lasting impression on anybody
who attended them. Here is how Iris Murdoch, not a regular student,
remembered Wittgenstein in retrospect:

126
 He was very good-looking. Rather small, with a very, very intel-
ligent, shortish face and piercing eyes – a sharpish, intent, alert
face and those very piercing eyes. He had a trampish sort of
appearance. And he had two empty rooms, with no books, and
just a couple of deck chairs and, of course, his camp bed. Both
he and his setting were very unnerving. His extraordinary
directness of approach and the absence of any sort of parapher-
nalia were the things that unnerved people. I mean with most
people, you meet them in a framework, and there are certain
conventions about how you talk to them and so on. There isn’t
a naked confrontation of personalities. But Wittgenstein always
imposed this confrontation on all his relationships. I met him
only twice and I didn’t know him well and perhaps that’s why I
always thought of him, as a person, with awe and alarm.20

Wittgenstein had no handouts, did not read from a script and

did not even have notes, since he considered a lecture based on
such ‘material’ artificial and stale. However, he did make much use
of the blackboard. He was unforgiving with those who came late
and did not allow casual attendance. As he said, ‘My lectures are
not for tourists.’ Since he had thought about the problems involved
for a long time, he only prepared for a few minutes before the lecture,
recapitulating the previous week’s results, then spoke freely and
improvised, following one line of thought as it occurred to him
there and then. His discourses, like his later writings, were illustrat-
ed with a wealth of vivid examples, striking metaphors and similes.
He spoke with great authority and even when he struggled to find
his words, or even remain silent for a long time, everybody had the
impression that something important and groundbreaking was
happening in their midst. ‘During these silences, Wittgenstein was
extremely tense and active. His gaze was concentrated; his face was
alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was
stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme serious-

127
The view from Wittgenstein’s window in Trinity College, Cambridge.

ness, absorption, and force of intellect.’21 Often he would conduct a

monologue with himself and not let anybody interrupt him. Then
again, he would engage somebody from the audience in a dialogue.
His students were often frightened by him. Impatient and irascible,
he forced them to formulate their thoughts in a precise way. Luckily,
unlike in Austrian primary schools, there was no corporal punish-
ment at Cambridge.

Wittgenstein’s severity was connected, I think, with his passion-

ate love of truth. He was constantly fighting with the deepest
philosophical problems. The solution of one problem led to
another problem. Wittgenstein was uncompromising; he had to

128
 have complete understanding. He drove himself fiercely. His whole
being was under a tension. No one at the lectures could fail to
perceive that he strained his will, as well as his intellect, to the
utmost. This was one aspect of his absolute, relentless honesty.
Primarily, what made him an awesome and even terrible person,
both as a teacher and in personal relationships, was his ruthless
integrity, which he did not spare himself or anyone else.22

Wittgenstein was rarely satisfied with his lectures. He would some-

times exclaim ‘I’m just too stupid today!’ or ‘You have a dreadful
teacher!’ So exhausted and disgusted was he by his lectures that
after class he often rushed off to the cinema to watch Hollywood
movies, especially Westerns, sitting in the front row to disconnect
himself fully from philosophy. He hardly watched any other
movies. ‘The typical American film, naïve and silly, can – for all its
silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. The fatuous, self-
conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a
lesson from a silly American film.’23 There are a few other reflec-
tions on film from the same period in his diaries:

In one regard I must be a very modern person since the cinema

has such an extraordinary beneficial effect on me. I cannot
imagine any rest for the mind more adequate to me than an
American movie. What I see & the music give me a blissful
sensation perhaps in an infantile way but therefore of course
no less powerful. In general as I have often thought & said a
film is something very similar to a dream & thoughts of Freud
are directly applicable to it.24

After lecturing for two years in a row, in 1931 Wittgenstein felt

that he needed more time to focus on his manuscripts and was
granted research leave for a year. Nevertheless, he continued to
give unpaid classes to interested students in his rooms. He was

129
extremely productive in this period; by the summer of 1932 he had
completed the tenth volume of his new manuscripts. His overall
project consisted in dismantling the philosophy of the Tractatus
and replacing it with his new ideas on the nature of language, logic
and mathematics (see chapter Eight). He had also been cooperat-
ing, since 1929, with Friedrich Waismann on a book-length system-
atic presentation of his main ideas, announced as Logic, Language,
Philosophy. The book was Schlick’s idea. It was to be written by
Waismann in a lucid and accessible style, thus contrasting with
Wittgenstein’s oracular writing. Waismann met Wittgenstein on
many occasions, mainly during the latter’s holidays in Austria,
but the book was doomed, because Wittgenstein’s philosophy
was undergoing profound and unforeseeable changes, which made
him periodically reject Waismann’s drafts. As Waismann acknowl-
edged, ‘[Wittgenstein] has the marvellous gift of always seeing
everything as if for the first time. But I think it’s obvious how diffi-
cult any collaboration is, since he always follows the inspiration of
the moment and demolishes what he has previously planned.’25
When Schlick, the spiritus rector of the project, was murdered by a
disgruntled student in Vienna in 1936, Wittgenstein abandoned it.
It was nevertheless completed by Waismann, and finally published
in 1965 as The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. The book remains
one of the most readable introductions to Wittgenstein’s thinking.
In 1931 Wittgenstein also worked on a series of remarks about
James Frazer’s monumental study in comparative anthropology
and religion, The Golden Bough (12 volumes, 1911–15). The study
was, despite its enormous scholarship, typical of the positivism
at the turn of the century insofar as it took the myths of so-called
primitive people to be primitive indeed, namely primitive science.
According to Frazer, myth and magic are based on false beliefs.
They are superstitions about natural phenomena, which were over-
come in the West through the scientific revolution. Wittgenstein
started reading the first volume of Frazer’s book with Drury, but

130
they did not get very far, since Wittgenstein stopped frequently to
express his disapproval. His main contention was that Frazer was
not attempting to understand primitive myths, but to give a merely
genetic explanation of their historical origins (and even that
explanation was mistaken). But this is to miss the actual meaning
of the myths, their depth, their similarity to our own mythical and
metaphysical ways of thinking. Frazer’s explanations of primitive
practices are more primitive than the practices themselves,
Wittgenstein contended. In reality, ‘[a]ll religions are wonderful’,
he said to Drury, ‘even those of the primitive tribes.’

Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind

is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors. Was
Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every
page of the Confessions? . . . But – one might say – if he was not
in error, surely the Buddhist holy man was – or anyone else –
whose religion gives expression to completely different views . . .
The very idea of wanting to explain a practice – for example, the
killing of the priest-king – seems wrong to me. All that Frazer
does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does.
It is very remarkable that in the final analysis all these practices
are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity. But it will
never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer
stupidity.26

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is

obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific
effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at
satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all;
we just behave this way and then feel satisfied . . . The same
savage, who stabs the picture of his enemy apparently in order
to kill him, really builds his hut out of wood and carves his
arrow skilfully and not in effigy . . . What a narrow spiritual life

131
 on Frazer’s part! As a result: how impossible it was for him to
conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time!
Frazer cannot imagine a priest who is not basically a present-
day English parson with the same stupidity and dullness . . .
Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages.27

It was soon after he resumed his public lectures in the academic

year 1932–3 that Wittgenstein met Francis Skinner, a 20-year-old
undergraduate in mathematics, the most promising of his year.
He was good-looking, shy, gentle, bright, all features Wittgenstein
found attractive, and within a short time Francis became a constant
companion, an utterly devoted pupil and collaborator. How much
Wittgenstein came to love Skinner can be gathered from the fact
that the manuscript (Philosophical Remarks) on which Wittgenstein
was working at the time contained the specification that the book
should be published with the dedication ‘To Francis Skinner’. There
is a parallel here to David Pinsent, since the Tractatus was dedicated
to the latter. But while David had not reciprocated Wittgenstein’s
feelings, Francis did. A few months after they met they started
exchanging affectionate letters and addressed each other by their
first names (which in those days had a greater significance than
today). Thus in December 1932 Francis wrote: ‘I am glad to read
that you think about me. I think about you a lot.’ When Wittgenstein
was away during the summer vacation, Francis wrote: ‘I feel much
further away from you, and am longing to be nearer you again.’28
From reading the letters one gets the impression that the infatuation
or at least frankness was greater on Francis’ side. He was so
completely enamoured with Ludwig, so eager to please him, that
he gave up his course in mathematics and slavishly devoted himself
to the work of his older friend. Wittgenstein, on the other hand,
needed this kind of attention and devotion, and the presence of the
younger man suited him, making him calmer and more at ease with
himself, as was observed by others. The relationship was asymmet-

132
Wittgenstein with
his close friend
Frank Skinner in
Cambridge.

rical not only in an emotional but also in a philosophical respect,

since Wittgenstein used his companion, whose official supervisor
he was, not so much to discuss his ideas, but rather to record them.
For three years they worked intensely, preparing Wittgenstein’s
book for publication, and Wittgenstein dictated to him and a few
other close pupils several texts, including the so-called Blue Book
(1933–4) and Brown Book (1934–5), the former consisting of lectures
that can be read as an accessible introduction to his later philoso-
phy. Valuable notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures were also taken by
Skinner.
How soon the relationship became intimate is difficult to tell,
but intimate it did become. There is evidence of their love from
later years. In letters from 1936 Francis speaks repeatedly about it.
‘I think of you a lot and of our love for each other. This keeps me
going and gives me cheerfulness and helps me to get over despon-
dency.’29 There are also encoded entries in Wittgenstein’s diaries
from 1937–8 which mention Ludwig’s sensual feelings for his
friend.30 These passages also reveal that Wittgenstein felt guilty
about these feelings. Here is one such intimate passage:

133
 Masturbated last night. Pangs of conscience. But also the con-
viction that I am too weak to resist the impulse and temptation
when certain images enter my mind, and I am not able to take
refuge in other ones. And only yesterday evening I had thought
about the necessity of the purity of my development! (I was
thinking about Marguerite and Francis.)31

Note that Wittgenstein mentions Marguerite Respinger in this con-

text as well. As Ray Monk has pointed out, it is a distortion to say,
as the popular cliché has it, that Wittgenstein was tormented by
his homosexuality, or at least solely by it.32 Rather, he was troubled
by sexuality as such, since it undermined the possibility of becom-
ing the kind of self-controlled and chaste person he wanted to be.
This is related to his belief in the sharp Weiningerian distinction
between love and sex. Plausible as this explanation is, it is difficult
to assume that the cause of his troubles with sex originated solely
in Weininger’s writings and would haunt him even in his mid-forties.
Not even Wittgenstein was that cerebral. Rather, it is more likely
that Weininger’s theory brought out a basic insecurity about sex,
which troubled him especially when it interfered with love, which
he valued above all things. While the diary passages about sex are
rare, tight-lipped and guilt-ridden, those concerning love and
friendship are more explicit and at times even serene. Witness the
following passage written towards the end of his life in connection
with his feelings for another young man, Ben Richards:

Love is a joy. Maybe joy with pain, but joy nevertheless. If the
joy is missing or it shrinks to a tiny flame, then love will be
missing . . . Love is connected to one’s nature . . . Love is that
pearl of great value which one holds to the heart, which one
does not exchange for anything else, which one deems the most
valuable thing. It shows one, when one has it, the meaning of
great value itself. One learns what this means: to know the

134
 value. One learns what this means: to separate precious metal
from the rest.33

In 1936 both Wittgenstein’s fellowship and Skinner’s graduate

course came to an end. Wittgenstein had decided to quit academia
again and he convinced his friend to do the same. Skinner volun-
teered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but was turned down.
Skinner’s other preferred profession, a doctor, was one Wittgenstein
envisaged for himself in these years. But due to shortage of funding,
Skinner eventually settled for Wittgenstein’s second, more
Tolstoyan choice: being a factory worker. It was as if Wittgenstein
was trying to recreate his younger self in Francis. Understandably,
the young man’s parents, knowing how promising his initial results
in mathematics had been, were outraged and completely opposed
to this choice and Wittgenstein’s influence on their son. But Francis
accepted only Ludwig’s authority, and thus entered an apprentice-
ship as a mechanic at a company in Cambridge, which did not make
him very happy. They saw each other more sporadically in 1936–7,
since Wittgenstein was mostly away from England, but in 1938,
when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, they lived together as a
couple in Francis’s flat in Cambridge. However, by 1939 the relation-
ship had deteriorated, maybe because of the too-intense closeness
between the two. The philosopher sought to distance himself, both
emotionally and physically, from the overly devout love of the
younger man. The relationship was finally brought to a tragic end
when Skinner died in 1941, at the age of 29, of poliomyelitis.
Wittgenstein was devastated. At Francis’s funeral he was described
as behaving like a ‘frightened wild animal’.34 A few months later he
wrote in his diary:

Think a lot about Francis, but always only with remorse over
my lovelessness; not with gratitude. His life and death seem
only to accuse me, for I was in the last two years of his life very

135
 often loveless and, in my heart, unfaithful to him. If he had not
been so boundlessly gentle and true, I would have become totally
loveless towards him.35

And in 1946 he wrote:

Ask yourself this question: when you die, who will grieve for
you; and how deep will this grieving be? Who is grieving for
Francis; how deeply do I grieve for him, I, who have more rea-
son for grieving than anybody else? Does he not deserve that
somebody grieves for him for the rest of his life? If anybody,
then he does. Here one is inclined to say: God will save him and
give him what a bad person has denied him.36

Apart from his relationship with Skinner and his philosophical

progress, there were few other significant developments in
Wittgenstein’s life up to 1938. He was mostly dedicated to his phil-
osophy and in this was extraordinarily productive. His mode of
composition was as before. He entered remarks in notebooks, then
compiled them in more polished form in large manuscripts or in
dictation to a typist. Countless manuscripts and typescripts were
thus completed, but because he was never satisfied with them, he
constantly redrafted and reworked them, cutting out and repos-
itioning individual remarks, sometimes agonizing over individual
phrases and sentences, all to find ‘the liberating word’. The most
important work from this period is the so-called Big Typescript,
named posthumously and published only very recently in English.
This is a long typescript of some 750 pages, which he dictated to a
typist while on holiday in Hochreit in 1933, and which embodied the
fruits of his intense work since 1929. One third of it deals with phil-
osophy of mathematics – a clear sign of the importance he attached
to the topic. The rest deals with the essence of language, the philoso-
phy of psychology and the nature of philosophy – in other words

136
the main interests of his later work. The Big Typescript was evidently
intended as the draft of a major book, containing chapter headings
and a table of contents, but upon completion he was so dissatisfied
that he called it a ‘rubbish bin’, attempting to redraft it at least
three times. This is surely a misjudgement, since the text is philo-
sophically extremely rich. Many remarks in his later masterwork,
Philosophical Investigations, are adopted straight from it. The Big
Typescript can be read as an independent book and is at times more
transparent and explicit than the Philosophical Investigations,
containing illuminating reflections that he did not exploit later,
for reasons nobody will ever know. After discarding the Big Typescript,
Wittgenstein worked on other attempts to formulate his new
philosophy and, finally, in 1936, he started a manuscript that would
lead to the Philosophical Investigations.
The only other significant events of these years were his journey
to the Soviet Union in 1935 and his stay in Norway in 1936. Both
can be seen as attempts to flee from his academic existence in
Cambridge. Moreover, his attraction to the Soviet Union was based
on escaping the West, a civilization he perceived as doomed and
decadent. Wittgenstein had read Keynes’s essay A Short View of
Russia. Although Keynes was very critical of the economic system
in the Soviet state, he expressed admiration for the Communists’
ability to found a quasi-religious faith. This is what Wittgenstein
was probably drawn to when reading Keynes’s description – the
prospect of a radically new life, of religious renewal on Tolstoyan
terms. Wittgenstein’s reasoning is not entirely transparent, however.
For, as Ray Monk has pointed out, the Soviet Union in the 1930s
was not Tolstoy’s idyllic country but the Moloch of Stalin’s Five
Year Plans.37 Was Wittgenstein also influenced by his surround-
ings? After all, in the early 1930s Cambridge was going through a
communist frenzy. There were not only the Apostles, a playground
and recruiting ground for Marxists, but also the Cambridge
Communist Party and the Cambridge Communist Cell. There

137
were people like the art historian Anthony Blunt and the under-
graduate Kim Philby, who later formed the notorious spy-ring of
the Cambridge Five. W. W. Bartley III has even alleged, without
proof, that Wittgenstein was a recruiter of these spies. Last, but
not least, Wittgenstein had several Marxist friends, such as Piero
Sraffa, Nikolai Bakhtin, Fania Pascal and George Thompson. But
it is unlikely that somebody as uncompromising as Wittgenstein
could have been influenced by such an indoctrinated context.
Whatever sympathy Wittgenstein had for communism, it
was probably not based on ideological reasons. He once said to
Thompson, a classicist and member of the Communist Party, ‘I am
a Communist’, but immediately added ‘at heart’. By contrast, to
Fania Pascal, an Ukrainian philosopher settled in Britain, he spoke
in such a deprecatory way about Marxist ideology that on one
occasion he managed to outrage her. It seems that his aversion to
anything doctrinal and organized affected not only his attitude to
religion, but also to politics, and Marxism could not be excepted
from this. An episode with Pascal confirms this:

I had just been elected to the Cambridge Committee of the

Friends of the Soviet Union and imparted the good news to the
two of them. Wittgenstein told me firmly that political work
was the worst possible thing for me to do; it would do me great
harm. ‘What you should do is to be kind to others. Nothing
else. Just be kind to others.’38

Furthermore, the Marxist doctrine of social engineering did not fit

well into Wittgenstein’s overall world picture. As he wrote in 1930
in a projected preface to Philosophical Remarks, the spirit of modern
civilization ‘the expression of which is the industry, architecture,
music, of present day fascism & socialism, is a spirit that is alien &
uncongenial to the author’.39 Note that Wittgenstein here places
socialism next to fascism, not unlike a conservative thinker such

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as Martin Heidegger, who around the same time saw communism,
fascism and even democracy originating from one and the same
source, namely ‘the universal rule of the will to power’.40
Heidegger, perversely, joined the party lines of National Socialism.
Since joining a party and ideology was not a route available to
Wittgenstein, the only explanation we can find for his attraction
to the Soviet Union is his romantic longing for a new life – paired
with political naïvety and ignorance about the situation in the
Soviet Union.41
Thus in the early 1930s Wittgenstein considered settling in
Russia for good, ideally with Francis, where they would take up
medical training or work as simple labourers. He even learned
Russian to this end (which enabled him to read Dostoevsky in the
original). Provided with contacts to Soviet officials and academics
through Keynes, Wittgenstein finally went on a reconnaissance trip
in September 1935. We do not know much about this journey. He
stayed for two weeks, travelled to Leningrad and Moscow, and met
many people, especially scientists and Marxist philosophers. They
seemed to misunderstand the purpose of his stay; they offered him
academic posts, in one case a professorship at Kazan University
(where his idol Tolstoy had studied in 1844!), but not the simple
work he sought for himself and Francis. When he introduced
himself to Sophia Janovskaya, a philosopher from Moscow, she
exclaimed ‘What, not the great Wittgenstein?’ For a while after his
return from Russia Wittgenstein toyed with the idea of accepting
the academic posts. However, his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union
was gone. Why exactly, we do not know, since he remained almost
completely silent about his experience, apparently so as not to have
his name used for anti-Soviet propaganda. A plausible explanation
could be that he was simply disillusioned by the realities of the
Soviet Union, given that he now compared Soviet life to being a
private in an army.42 But this is at odds with the fact that even after
his trip Wittgenstein did not make much of the justified criticism

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of Stalin’s totalitarianism. ‘Tyranny doesn’t make me feel indig-
nant’, he said to Rush Rhees. He continued to express his sympathy
with the Soviet experiment, presumably because it seemed to be so
different from the decaying West, indeed even after the show trials
during the Great Purge of 1936, not to mention the organized mass
starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s. As
late as 1939 he said to Drury: ‘People have accused Stalin of having
betrayed the Russian Revolution. But they have no idea of the
problems that Stalin had to deal with; and the dangers he saw
threatening Russia.’43 The irony is that Stalin himself cited such
‘problems’ and ‘dangers’ to justify his Gulag camps. This understand-
ing for the mass-murderer Stalin is incomprehensible, if we are to
take Wittgenstein’s otherwise firm ethical commitments seriously.
At least he did not make a fool of himself publicly like other
intellectuals in Britain, for instance George Bernard Shaw, who in
1934 described Stalin as the most candid and honest man, and the
Soviet people as well-fed – just when they were suffering the most
terrible famines.44
Wittgenstein’s fellowship at Trinity was extended for one more
year and finished with the summer term of 1936, which left him
without any income and again with the feeling of being an outcast.
He decided to go to Norway, as in 1913, to finish his work, but pos-
sibly also to get away from the slightly suffocating relationship
with Francis. At the end of August he was again in his old house
near Skjolden. For well over a month he attempted to rework his
latest manuscript (the Brown Book), but eventually became exasper-
ated with it and gave up, considering the result ‘worthless’, ‘boring
and artificial’. He then started a new version of his book, which,
as mentioned earlier, later made up a significant portion of the
Philosophical Investigations. Once again, Norway proved to be the
right environment for him to do serious philosophical work. But it
also proved to be the right place to deal with his sins. Feeling that
he was morally depraved, he wrote up a very personal confession,

140
which he distributed among friends and family. Among the
addressees were Skinner, Moore, Drury, Engelmann and Pascal.
We do not know exactly what the confession contained, since most
of his intimates never revealed anything about it. From Pascal we
know that it dealt with Wittgenstein’s denial of his Jewishness and
his maltreatment of a pupil during his time as a schoolteacher.
According to another source it also dealt with his sexuality.
Apart from several visits to Vienna and Cambridge, Wittgenstein
stayed in Norway until Christmas 1937. There is a kind of romantic
cult surrounding Wittgenstein’s trips to Norway,45 but in reality his
stays were always accompanied by loneliness and despair. This was
particularly true this time around. The thought of having to live on
his own in his hut frightened him so much that for a while he chose
to live in the house of Anna Rebni, an old woman he knew from the
pre-war years. This anxiety gave him reason to reflect, once again, on
his ethical standing. His impression was that, despite the personal
confession he had written only the previous year, he was losing grip
of himself again. He felt weak, shabby, depressed, seeing his own life
as a problem. To use a phrase by Flaubert: his life was not ‘dans le
vrai’. And this brought him to reflect on religious faith again. This
time he described himself as irreligious, for ‘a man who lived rightly
won’t experience the problem [of life] as sorrow’. He admitted to not
understanding the Christian faith. In February 1937 he wrote: ‘Let me
confess this: After a difficult day for me I kneeled during dinner
today & prayed & suddenly said, kneeling & looking up above:
“There is no one here.” That made me feel at ease as if I had been
enlightened in an important matter.’46
This passage, written in code, may be seen as a turning point in
his attitude to religion. Clearly, the religious fervour of his former
years had vanished. As he later said of his Catholic friends: ‘I could
not possibly bring myself to believe all the things that they believe.’
In the strict sense of the word he was probably no longer religious.
But in a sense there were still elements of religiosity in him. After

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all, he was conscious that he was living a life of sin and sorrow,
a consciousness that in his earlier ‘Lecture on Ethics’ he had
described as one of the three basic religious experiences. And there
were still moments when he found the Christian faith attractive.
Concerning this there is an intriguing passage in his diary from
December 1937. He was on the ship returning from Skjolden to
Bergen and came, while reading the Bible, across a passage in
Corinthians 12:3: ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but
through the Holy Ghost.’ While he agreed with this passage,
because he felt that talk about Jesus as the Lord coming to judge
him was meaningless to him, he also wrote:

What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection? I play

as it were with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead,
then he decomposed in the grave like every human being. He is
dead & decomposed. In that case he is a teacher, like any other &
can no longer help; & we are once more orphaned & alone. And
have to make do with wisdom & speculation. It is as though we
are in a hell, where we can only dream & are shut out from
heaven, roofed in as it were. But if I am to be REALLY redeemed,
– I need certainty – not wisdom, dreams, speculation – and this
certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul,
needs, not my speculative intellect. For my soul, with its pas-
sions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not
my abstract mind. Perhaps one may say: Only love can believe
the Resurrection.47

Wittgenstein’s attitude to faith was to be an ambivalent one

from now on, not that of a believer, but not that of an atheist
either. It was, at times, a more exploring, indeed philosophical
attitude. All talk about the ineffable and the Higher was dropped
(as was his distinction between saying and showing). Not speaking
from the inner perspective of the mystic any more, he was now

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able to look at religion as such, its function in human life, at the
role of religious beliefs in people’s lives. This decidedly anthropo-
logical stance became explicit in three lectures he gave on religious
belief when he returned to Cambridge in 1938. What we know
about these lectures is based only on notes by his students, but
even so they give insight into his ideas on a topic that always pre-
occupied Wittgenstein, although he wrote very little on it.48 In these
lectures he sets out to defend religion against the attack under
which it has come in modern times, especially through the rise of
science. Religion is radically different from science and therefore
does not stand in competition with it. In particular, religious state-
ments are not empirical statements or theories about the (after-)
world competing with scientific ones. They are not held on the
basis of evidence, as is for instance some hypothesis about our
galaxy, and it is therefore a grave mistake to treat them on a par
with scientific theories, as both atheists and certain theologians do.
The physicist who rejects the existence of God or the Christian doc-
trine of the Resurrection because there is no evidence for it and the
theologian who accepts God’s existence on the basis of supposed
evidence (or even ‘proofs’) are making the same mistake. Rather,
religious beliefs, and notions such as ‘God’, ‘resurrection’, ‘sin’, etc.
have no theoretical function at all. They only crystallize primordial
ways of life, and are in this sense secondary. ‘the words you utter or
what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as
the difference they make at various points in your life . . . Practice
gives the words their sense.’49 Religious statements express an atti-
tude to life as a whole, for example, guilt, and only have meaning
with reference to a certain form of life, to certain existential experi-
ences. Note that religious statements now are described as having
a meaning, while in his earlier philosophy he had dismissed them
as meaningless. ‘A religious question is either a question of life and
death or it is (empty) babble. This language-game, one might say,
gets played only with questions of life and death. Much like the

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expression “Ouch” only has a meaning as a cry of pain.’50 A believer
saying ‘There will be a Judgement Day and this is when I shall be
judged’ is not like a meteorologist predicting that it will rain
tomorrow. It is more like the cry for help of a man fighting for
his life against a raging fire. His actions will not be based on form-
ing hypotheses through judicious inductive inferences (e.g. ‘Fire
has hurt me in the past. This is a fire. Therefore this fire will hurt
me now’), but on terror.51 Religious beliefs and rituals express this
terror, among other things (they also express awe for the fact of
life, etc.). Since they are not based on opinions and hypotheses,
there is nothing right or wrong about them, and believers are
neither rational nor irrational.

Consider someone in horrible pain, say when something

particular is happening in his body, yelling ‘Away, away!’, even
though there is nothing that he wishes away, – could one say
now: ‘These words are wrongly applied’?? One wouldn’t say such
a thing. Equally, if, for example, he makes a ‘defensive’ gesture
or rather falls upon his knees & folds his hands, one couldn’t
reasonably declare these to be wrong gestures. This is just what
he does in such a situation. There can be no talk of ‘wrong’
here . . . Apply this to prayer. How could one say of him who
must wring his hands & beseech, that he is mistaken or in
an illusion.52

There are several important consequences of Wittgenstein’s

reflections on religion. One is that there is no need for a proof for
the existence of God, given the non-theoretical and non-cognitive
status of statements about God. Another is the radical difference
between scientific and religious statements, which implies that
there can be no dialogue between scientists and believers. Religious
discourse is fundamental and irreducible, and thus incommensurable
with scientific discourse. (This also implies that a scientist can be

144
religious.) It follows that there can be no science of religion, no
scientific explanation of religious beliefs in terms of other factors,
such as sexuality (Freud), society (Marx) or evolution (Darwin).
All we can and should do is describe religious life, not explain it.
Wittgenstein’s understanding of religion stands in sharp opposition
to contemporary attempts to explain religion away, like now
fashionable neuroscientific theories based on ‘brain scanning’.
It has affinities with other non-reductive investigations into the
nature of religion that emerged in the early twentieth century, for
example, Rudolf Otto’s or Mircea Eliade’s phenomenologies of reli-
gion. Last but not least, given the non-theoretical status of religious
statements, one cannot use rational discourse to make somebody
believe in them. But what would make one believe in a religious
doctrine then? On this, Wittgenstein does not say anything sub-
stantial, indeed presents himself as agnostic:

Suppose someone said: ‘What do you believe, Wittgenstein?

Are you a sceptic? Do you know whether you will survive
death?’ I would really, this is a fact, say, ‘I can’t say. I don’t
know,’ because I haven’t any clear idea what I’m saying when
I’m saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist,’ etc.53

However, towards the end of his life we find the following intrigu-
ing entry in his diary:

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are
what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms
of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’,
but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God
in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they
give us rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, –
life can force this concept on us.54

145
So perhaps ‘life’ itself gives reasons to be a believer. But it is charac-
teristic of Wittgenstein in his later years that he did not say that life
has educated him to believe in God. At least, he continued to take
religion immensely serious and also to pray occasionally. As he
confessed to Drury: ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help
seeing every problem from a religious point of view.’55

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 7

Professorship and Wartime, 1939–47

The rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany throughout the 1930s

was something even an apolitical person like Wittgenstein could
not ignore. As George Thompson saw it, Wittgenstein became
politically aware during the 1930s, at least in so far as he was ‘alive
to the evils of unemployment and fascism and the growing danger
of war’.1 But the black cloud slowly gathering over European civil-
ization was of little personal concern for him. There is at any rate
no significant mention of the Nazis in his diaries or letters of the
time. However, things changed dramatically in 1938, the year in
which Austria, his native land, was annexed into Greater Germany.
At the turn of the previous year, Wittgenstein was, as every year,
visiting his family in Vienna for the Christmas vacation. They gath-
ered around the Christmas tree and sang the Austrian national
anthem, feeling, as Hermine put it in retrospect, that it was ‘the
most lovely Christmas ever’.2 It was also to be their last Christmas
together. Wittgenstein went on to visit his former pupil Drury,
who was training as a psychiatrist in Dublin (after Wittgenstein
had convinced him to give up his studies at Cambridge).
Wittgenstein was very interested in Drury’s work and was allowed
to visit and talk to mentally ill patients a few times per week. From
Dublin he followed anxiously the developments in Austria, asking
Drury about the news every evening. He was also in correspon-
dence with Ludwig Hänsel, who gave him a detailed description
of the political situation in Austria, telling him about ‘triumphal

147
rallies of the [Austrian] Nazis’ taking place all over the country. On
12 March 1938 Drury informed Wittgenstein about the Anschluss.
Wittgenstein and his family were now no longer Austrians, but
Germans or, more precisely, German Jews, which made them sub-
ject to the racist Nuremberg Laws. Wittgenstein wrote on the same
day in his diary: ‘What I hear about Austria disturbs me. Am
unclear what I should do, whether to go to Vienna or not.’ And
a few days later, contemplating the various external and internal
dilemmas, including his own Jewishness, involved in possessing
a Judenpaß, he wrote:

I am now in an extraordinarily difficult situation . . . I have

become a German citizen. That is for me a frightful circumstance,
for I am now subject to a power that I do not in any sense recog-
nise. The German citizenship is like a hot iron which I would
have to constantly carry with me . . . What would now be the dif-
ference between a Judenpaß and the old Austrian passport? Why
should this one, but not the other one, burn in the pocket? Is it
because of the stigma associated with it in Austria? You will live in
Austria with your relatives and not notice it; and the same abroad.
In spite of this, I sense that this association will be a permanent
burden on me. Partly because my situation won’t be stated in
clear and simple terms . . . But also because I could not work in
Austria; and I must work in order to live, I mean: to keep myself
sane . . . But one could say: Why don’t you want to endure all this
for your family? Possible imprisonment in Austria, unemploy-
ment, separation from your dearest friend, disquiet and anxiety
before losing freedom, a crooked inclination in all directions?
Why not assume it? How would I have to position myself to be
able to assume it? I am afraid, I am not capable of this position.3

Nevertheless, he wrote to his family, offering to come to Vienna.

He also contemplated changing his nationality and wrote to Piero

148
Sraffa in Cambridge for advice. Sraffa urged him ‘you must not go to
Vienna’, for he would not have been allowed to leave the country
again. Fortunately, Wittgenstein complied. Within days he decided
to renounce his Austrian citizenship, accepting that he would be an
immigrant from now on. ‘But the thought of leaving my people
alone is dreadful.’4 On Sraffa’s advice he first sought permanent
employment with the university, asking for Keynes’s support:

The thought of acquiring British citizenship had occurred to

me before; but I have always rejected it on the ground: that I
do not wish to become a sham-english-man (I think you will
understand what I mean). The situation was however entirely
changed for me now. For now I have to choose between two new
nationalities, one of which deprives me of everything, while the
other, at least, would allow me to work in a country in which
I have spent on and off the greater part of my adult life, have
made my greatest friends and have done my best work.5

With Keynes’s assistance Wittgenstein was appointed to a uni-

versity lectureship. He then applied for naturalization, which was
granted to him only one year later, in June 1939. More worrisome
was the situation of his family. Since in the eyes of the Nazi author-
ities only one of Wittgenstein’s grandparents was ‘Aryan’, Ludwig
and his siblings all counted as Jews. Initial attempts by the family
to renegotiate their racial status and prove that at least one more
grandparent was an ‘Aryan’ failed. Paul Wittgenstein eventually
left Austria and settled in New York. Margarete already lived in
America with her husband. But Hermine and Helene refused to
leave their native country until it was too late. With Margarete’s
help they procured false Yugoslav passports to get over to
Switzerland, but all three sisters were soon arrested and spent a
few nights in prison. Fortunately, they were cleared of charges in
the subsequent trial. But the danger was really only lifted when the

149
Wittgensteins struck a financial deal with the Nazis. As Jews they
were forced to sign over most of their assets to the Reichsbank.
But since most of the family fortune was deposited in funds in us
banks, the Nazis needed the cooperation of the family to access this
money. The negotiations were brought to completion in August
1939. Hermann Christian Wittgenstein was declared of ‘German
blood’, which made all his grandchildren, including Ludwig and his
sisters, into Mischlinge (‘hybrids’) of first degree. This status could
be lost if they were to marry a Jewish person, but they were soon
excepted even from this condition. In return, the Wittgensteins
transferred a staggering 1.7 tons of gold to the Nazi state, no less
than 2 per cent of Austria’s gold reserves at the time. Ludwig,
who was very worried about his family during this period, became
involved in the negotiations as soon as he received his British pass-
port, and travelled to Berlin, Vienna and even New York to help out
with the transaction. One may wonder about the ethical implica-
tions of this deal. A vast fortune was given to the Nazi machine,
which was soon to wreck millions of people’s lives, just so that the
two women’s ‘perverse desire to stay in Austria’ could be satisfied.
How could Wittgenstein, given his strict opposition to unethical
compromises, justify such a transaction? However, his opposition
to compromises primarily applied to his own life. Here others were
involved, over whose actions he had no control. He entered the
negotiations at a comparatively late stage, when his sisters had
already decided to stay in Austria and compromise with the Nazis.
He did not oppose their decision, as his brother Paul did (which
led to serious tensions in the family), but the main responsibility
was still his sisters’. Moreover, despite the totalitarian character of
Hitler’s regime in the late 1930s, the war and the Holocaust had not
yet taken place. And even if they had, who would not have acted
just like him in similar circumstances? Who would not have given
any available sum to save his beloved ones? The deal with the Nazis
did involve a moral dilemma, but its horns were straight from hell.

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 Despite the worries about his family, Wittgenstein continued to
work on philosophy after his return to Cambridge in 1938. In the
summer he prepared the material he had written in Norway for
publication, and offered it to Cambridge University Press under
the title Philosophical Remarks. It was the earliest version of the
Philosophical Investigations. The edition was supposed to be bilin-
gual, including the German original and an English translation
provided by one of his pupils, Rush Rhees. Wittgenstein withdrew
his manuscript from Cambridge University Press within a month,
being dissatisfied with both the content and Rhees’s translation.
The main reason for attempting this publication was his growing
dissatisfaction with the fact that since 1929 ideas connected to his
new philosophy had been disseminated by his colleagues and
pupils in a watered-down form. In 1932 he accused Rudolf Carnap
of plagiarism in letters to Schlick, not entirely without justification,
but in a much too ferocious manner. In 1933 he wrote a furious
letter to Mind, protesting against the inaccurate description of
his ideas in a rather innocuous article by Richard Braithwaite.
In 1935 Alice Ambrose, a gifted pupil, incurred his wrath because
she decided to publish an article summarizing his philosophy of
mathematics. He tried to convince her to abandon its publication,
but after both she and the editor of Mind, G. E. Moore, refused to
do so, Wittgenstein resigned as Ambrose’s phd examiner and
broke off all contacts with her.6
Rhees’s translation was not completely worthless, however. In
early 1939 Wittgenstein applied for the chair in philosophy recently
vacated by Moore, and submitted it as a token of his work. He was
convinced that he would not be elected because the Oxford philoso-
pher R. G. Collingwood, whom he suspected of hostile sentiments,
was on the election committee. But as C. D. Broad, who was person-
ally not fond of Wittgenstein either, remarked at the time: ‘To refuse
the chair to Wittgenstein would be like refusing Einstein a chair of
physics’, a remark that apparently amazed Wittgenstein.7 He was

151
elected professor on 11 February 1939. This was the highest profes-
sional distinction for an academic philosopher (and one denied to
other great thinkers, e.g., Schopenhauer and Frege), but it meant
little to him: ‘having got the professorship is very flattering & all
that but it might have been very much better for me to have got a
job opening & closing crossing gates. I don’t get a kick out of my
position (except what my vanity & stupidity sometimes gets).’8
He was to remain in the position till 1947.
His first lectures as a professor were on philosophy of mathe-
matics (published in 1976), a topic on which he worked almost
exclusively during the entire war. A year later, in 1940, he gave
seminars on his Philosophical Investigations and on aesthetics. As
in his lectures on religious belief, he argued in those on aesthetics
against the idolatry of ‘Science and the Scientist’.

You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beauti-

ful – almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to
include also what sort of coffee tastes well . . . The idea is that
once we are more advanced, everything – all the mysteries of
Art – will be understood by psychological experiments.
Exceedingly stupid as the idea is, this is roughly it.9

Scientific experiments can provide us with statistical data about

what people treat as ‘beautiful’ etc., but such experiments do not
tell us what is beautiful and why people find it so. The difference is
similar to the one between causality and motivation. If I am asked
in court ‘Why did you kill this man?’, the appropriate answer will
be to indicate the motives of my action, for example, because the
man cheated in poker. An answer with reference to the internal
mechanisms in my brain or body during my action will be simply
ignored (if I am lucky and the court does not think I am mocking
them!). Equally, when I am asked ‘Why do you find this sonnet
beautiful, the beginning of this fugue peculiar, this statue awesome,

152
etc.’, it would be a mockery to say ‘Because of this and that brain
process!’ or ‘Because 70 per cent of my relatives do!’ But what does
then define aesthetic appreciation? Wittgenstein’s answer is typical
of his later philosophy: don’t assume there must be a unique
answer to this question. Aesthetic appreciation is a very complex
phenomenon, Wittgenstein argues, indeed not one phenomenon,
but an ‘immensely complicated family of cases’. To be sure, in an
entry from his later diaries Wittgenstein does venture to indicate
a unique or at least central feature of art: ‘We might say: art
discloses the miracles of nature to us. It is based on the concept
of the miracles of nature.’10 But in his lectures Wittgenstein
is more careful: what art is cannot be indicated by a singular
definition, since there is not one single feature that unifies all
our aesthetic experiences or all those things we treat as works
of art. Hence, there can be no theory of art that subsumes every-
thing under general laws and causal explanations. What we need
in aesthetics are not theories and explanations, but (sympathetic)
descriptions.

The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a

very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call
a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what
you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture.
What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the
Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different
ages. What belongs to a language game is a whole culture.11

By 1940 the Second World War was well under way and
Wittgenstein, now a British citizen, was anxious to be involved in
war work of some kind, being frustrated with his confinement to
academic life, which he dreaded more than ever. For several years
he had been friends with Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), a philosopher
with whom he shared many ideas and who later was to become one

153
of Oxford’s most prominent thinkers and editor of Mind. Gilbert
Ryle introduced Wittgenstein to his brother, John Ryle, who had
been professor of medicine in Cambridge, but was now working
at Guy’s Hospital in London. To John Ryle Wittgenstein said: ‘I
feel I will die slowly if I stay [in Cambridge]. I would rather take a
chance of dying quickly.’12 As in the First World War he wished to
be placed ‘where the bombs are falling’. It was the old will to feel
alive in the face of great danger, to be pulled out of lethargy and
depression by the presence of death. But there was also a genuine
concern with his new homeland, as he told Drury:

You have often heard me speak of my dislike of many features

of English life. But now that England is in real danger, I realize
how fond I am of her; how I would hate to see her destroyed.
I have often said to myself that William the Conqueror got
himself a very good bargain.13

In September 1941 Wittgenstein started working as a dispensary

porter at Guy’s Hospital, which was in a heavily blitzed area of the
capital. However, for a while he continued to teach in Cambridge,
delivering private classes at weekends. His wish to work in London
in anonymity was respected, although most staff members knew
who he was and addressed him as ‘Professor Wittgenstein’. His
salary was 28 shillings a week (roughly £46 today), a fraction of
the several hundred pounds sterling he made as a professor in
Cambridge, and his main task consisted of delivering drugs to the
wards, although he apparently advised patients not to take them.
A former co-worker remembers: ‘after working here three weeks he
came and explained how we should be running the place. You see
he was a man who was used to thinking.’14 Soon he transferred to
the manufacturing department as a laboratory assistant, where one
of his responsibilities was to mix ointments for skin treatment,
a task at which he excelled.

154
 On the whole, his time at the hospital did not lift Wittgenstein’s
mood. At 52 he felt old and worn-out. Moreover, he was heartbroken
over Francis’s death in October 1941. He made a few friends, includ-
ing John Ryle and his wife Miriam, who took him for a weekend
to their house in Sussex. When, in April 1942, he had a gall-stone
removed from which he had suffered for years, Ryle held his hand
during the operation – a peculiar event, since Wittgenstein, dis-
trusting the surgeons, refused general anaesthetic and observed
the whole process through special mirrors installed for him. In the
hospital Wittgenstein also befriended Roy Fouracre, a colleague
at the dispensary. The latter was a simple, good-humoured young
man from Hackney, who had a calming effect on Wittgenstein.
When Wittgenstein was in a state of agitation, Fouracre would
calm him down by saying ‘Steady, Prof ’. As with Gilbert Pattison,
there was no intellectual dimension to their friendship. Nevertheless,
or maybe because of this, the ‘Prof ’ stayed friends with Fouracre to
the end of his life, and when the young man was sent to the Front
in the Far East, Wittgenstein wrote him many light-hearted letters,
urging him to come back soon so that they could ‘talk nonsense
by the yard’ again. At the hospital he also met Naomi Wilkinson,
a cousin of the Ryles, who organized gramophone recitals in which
Wittgenstein participated with much interest.
It was during his time at the hospital that Wittgenstein started
to preoccupy himself in more depth with Freudian psychology.
In the years 1942–6 he had several conversations with Rush Rhees
about Freud, of which Rhees took extensive notes.15 This was not
his first encounter with psychoanalysis. Not only did he know
about Freud from his sister Margarete, but Wittgenstein himself
had discussed psychoanalysis in his lectures on aesthetics in 1938.
Back then he expressed his admiration for those practical aspects of
Freud’s work which he considered illuminating, for example, Freud’s
imaginative interpretations of jokes in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious (1905). But his attitude to Freud’s theories was highly

155
critical. Not only did he disapprove of Freud’s dogmatic reduction
of dreams to purely sexual contexts, but he rejected the underlying
principle of explanation that posits hidden causal mechanisms in
the human psyche. In his view the main reason why people find
Freud’s ‘theory’ of the unconscious so plausible is the idol-worship
of science in our culture, the overwhelming attraction of the scien-
tific mode of thinking, of reducing everything to cause and effect.
In making such a reduction, one thinks that one finds out what
things ‘really’ are. Dreams ‘really’ are repressed sexual desires,
actions ‘really’ are caused by childhood experiences, people ‘really’
chatter because they are sexually unfulfilled, etc. To stress what
things ‘really’ are empowers the individual, makes him feel as a
destroyer of the prejudices of other, more naïve humans. For, as
Wittgenstein puts it, ‘It is charming to destroy prejudice.’16
In his conversations with Rhees he stressed again what he found
appealing in Freud, such as certain interpretations of dreams,
or the therapeutic, self-healing effects an interpretation of one’s
life in terms of Greek tragedy might have.

Many people have at some period, serious troubles in their lives

– so serious as to lead to thoughts of suicide. This is likely to
appear to one as something nasty, as a situation which is too
foul to be a subject of a tragedy. And it may then be an immense
relief if it can be shown that one’s life has the pattern rather of
a tragedy – the tragic working out and repetition of a pattern
which was determined by the primal scene.17

But Wittgenstein also stressed the dangers involved in accepting

any monolithic, uniform explanation of what is ‘really’ taking
place in the human soul. Freud claimed that his was a scientific
theory, but according to Wittgenstein it was pseudo-scientific or
at best pre-scientific. Psychoanalysis in fact consists in making
sense of phenomena by speculation based on free association –

156
a method that is prior to the formation of scientific hypotheses.
Through free association one could always find some ‘hidden’
meaning in any kind of phenomena, not just in dreams. Take
some table with random objects on it, for example, some papers,
pens, a mug, a phone, some books and cds. None of them has
been put there through your dream activity. Now fix your mind
on some problem of major significance in your life. It would not
be too difficult to connect the objects through some pattern in such
a way that the whole arrangement could be seen as a visualization
or interpretation of your problem. Horoscopes or the reading of
tea leaves are based on this kind of ‘method’. But this pattern-
creating interpretation does not prove anything, especially not
how things are ‘in reality’. We have not given a scientific explanation
of how the objects on the table are connected, but just superimposed
a certain story by pressing each object into its scheme. This activity
is similar to that of creating a myth. Indeed, Wittgenstein contends,
Freud’s stories are not scientific explanations, but actually new
myths.18 He writes:

Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some

way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this by
reference to evidence – for he could not do so. But it is an idea
which has . . . the attraction which mythological explanations
have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of some-
thing that has happened before . . . So it is with the notion of
the unconscious also. Freud does claim to find evidence in
memories brought to light in analysis. But at a certain stage it
is not clear how far such memories are due to the analyst.
In any case, do they show that the anxiety was necessarily a
repetition of the original anxiety?19

Freud has performed a great disservice with his phantastic

pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are ingenious).

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 (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in ‘explaining’
symptoms of illness.)20

At Guy’s Hospital Wittgenstein made the acquaintance of two

doctors, Basil Reeve and R. T. Grant, who were doing research on
so-called wound shock (or traumatic shock) often observed in the
numerous air-raid casualties. Not being able to give a precise clinical
definition to this notion, the doctors suggested eliminating the
notion ‘wound shock’ and simply recording the various symptoms
of the casualties in as much detail as possible. Wittgenstein became
interested in this approach, for it bore obvious similarities to the
idea expressed in a passage in Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics that
he had admired so much since his youth, that if we remove the
problematic notion of force, ‘our minds . . . will cease to ask illegit-
imate questions’ (see chapter Two). When the research unit moved
to Newcastle Wittgenstein was offered the position of laboratory
assistant, which was not only paid better, but offered him the
opportunity to carry out an intellectually more interesting task.
Wittgenstein transferred to Newcastle in April 1943, where he
stayed till February 1944. He left his mark here, as everywhere. As
a secretary remembers, Wittgenstein did not fit easily into the nar-
row social context. While in the morning he came down for break-
fast in a bright and chatty mood, his British colleagues preferred
to read the newspaper and not talk. In contrast, when they enjoyed
dinner together every evening, he had his meal alone in his room.
‘Prof. W. had difficulty in finding anywhere to live because as he
had a foreign accent, looked a bit shabby & said he was a professor,
most landladies were quite naturally suspicious.’21 His only friend
there was Dr Reeve. However, despite his social awkwardness, his
research was very successful. He not only invented an improved
device for recording pulse pressure and its relation to breathing
depth and rate, but also had a hand in the conceptual distinctions
drawn in the report on wound shock that was the final fruit of the

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research project (published in 1951). The device has been lost,
but Wittgenstein’s contribution is visible in Dr Grant’s report:

he has a keenly critical mind and in discussions of medical and

physiological problems has proved a most helpful and stimulating
colleague. He has undertaken observations on respiratory vari-
ations of blood pressure in man, devising his own experiments
and apparatus. The results of his work so far are at variance with
commonly accepted views and of considerable interest.22

Wittgenstein wrote hardly any philosophy in Newcastle, which

increasingly frustrated him. His main goal was still to finish and
publish the book he had been working on since his return to
philosophy in 1929. The book had gone through many versions,
manuscripts and typescripts, but none ever satisfied him. In
September 1943, after compiling yet another typescript, Wittgenstein
approached Cambridge University Press again, this time with
the plan to publish the new book together with the Tractatus as
Philosophical Investigations of the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.
The reason for this edition was that in this way his new ideas could
be ‘properly illuminated by being set in opposition to and against
the background of my former way of thinking’, as he wrote in the
Preface. Although the typescript was accepted by the publisher in
January 1944, Wittgenstein was so dissatisfied with it that he soon
retracted the offer. Incidentally, the idea of publishing the Tractatus
next to the Investigations had come to him in the previous year,
while re-reading his earlier book with the philologist Nikolai
Bakhtin, brother of the famous Marxist philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin. Nikolai originated from the Russian nobility and had
fought during the Russian Revolution on the side of the White
Army, but had become a devout communist in England, while also
keeping his Orthodox faith. Why Wittgenstein chose to re-read the
Tractatus with a philologist we do not know, but maybe because he

159
found it more fruitful to talk to a non-philosopher about his
ideas. Also, Bakhtin had a very lively and flamboyant personality.
Wittgenstein was fond of him precisely because they were so differ-
ent. The philosopher was ‘unusually happy and gay in [Bakhtin’s]
presence, and never dropped him as easily as he did others’.23 There
might have been even some intellectual affinities. Bakhtin was a
fierce opponent of uniformity and generality, of what he called
‘the tyranny of abstract ideas and dogmas over life’, which he saw
embodied in Plato’s philosophy, and endorsed instead Aristotle’s
preference for multiple distinctions, for ‘continuous transitions
of shades and qualities’, which fitted well with Wittgenstein’s new
philosophical orientation.24 However, to claim, as Terry Eagleton
has done, that Wittgenstein’s ideas were somehow related to the
Marxist aesthetics of Mikhail Bakhtin via this broad affinity with
brother Nikolai is to overlook subtle and not so subtle differences
between Wittgenstein and Marxist thought.25 ‘Like primitive
peoples, we are much more inclined to say “All these things,
though looking different, are really the same” than we are to say
“All these things, though looking the same, are really different.”’26
Wittgenstein left Newcastle in February 1944 and after an inter-
mezzo in Cambridge went to stay with Rhees in Swansea, where he
had been in the previous two summers, and where he was to return
several times in the following years.27 Rhees, who was teaching
philosophy at Swansea, had been one of his favourite pupils and was
now one of his closest friends. Rhees’s wife was a psychoanalyst
of the Jungian school. Hence, Wittgenstein was in good company.
He stayed in Swansea for almost half a year. It was here that he
stopped working on philosophy of mathematics, a topic that not
only had brought him to philosophy in the first place and made
him return to it, but one that he had pursued tirelessly since 1929
(around half of his manuscripts from 1929 to 1944 are dedicated to it).
Instead he now became interested in the philosophy of psychology
(or philosophy of mind, as we would say today), and it is due to

160
this shift of interest that the final manuscript of the Philosophical
Investigations contains no philosophy of mathematics, but plenty
of philosophy of psychology.28
In Swansea Wittgenstein worked intensively on his book, gave
lectures at the university and made friends with several locals, as
he found he could get along better with them than with people in
England. ‘The weather’s foul, but I enjoy not being in Cambridge . . .
I feel much more often like smiling, e.g. when I walk in the street,
or when I see children, etc.’29 He lodged with several locals, including
a Methodist minister, whom Wittgenstein teased with the remark
that the numerous books in the house were not bought to be read,
but to impress the flock. When the minister asked him whether he
believed in God, Wittgenstein replied: ‘Yes I do, but the difference
between what you believe and what I believe may be infinite.’30
Another incident involved one of the daughters of his neighbours,
whom he befriended. He had supervised her progress in school.
One day she came home in tears. Hearing that she had been failed,
Wittgenstein replied ‘Damn it all! We’ll see about that!’ and went
in a rage to see the responsible teacher. He told the latter: ‘I am
stunned that you say she failed and I can tell you on authority that
she must have passed.’ And indeed, she had. The teacher checked
the records and discovered that there had been a mistake.31
In October 1944 Wittgenstein was back in Cambridge, resuming
his lecturing, mostly on philosophy of psychology, and continuing
work on his book. He moved again into his old lodgings in
Whewell’s Court at Trinity College. During the Christmas vacation
of 1944–5, which he spent in Swansea, he must have felt that he was
nearing the end of his labours, for he drafted the final preface to
the still unfinished book. It was, he wrote, ‘the precipitate of philo-
sophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen
years’, adding grimly: ‘It is not impossible that it should fall to the
lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to
bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely.’

161
 Opus magnum:
The typescript of
Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical
Investigations.

He was still not satisfied with what he had done. As he wrote to

Norman Malcolm: ‘[The book] will probably disappoint you. And
the truth is: it’s pretty lousy. (Not that I could improve on it essen-
tially if I tried for another 100 years.)’32 Much of 1945 Wittgenstein
spent trawling yet again through his numerous manuscripts, select-
ing further remarks and even adding new material. The final type-
script of what we now call ‘Part 1’ of the Philosophical Investigations
was completed in 1945–6, but even then Wittgenstein could not
bring himself to publish it, and minor emendations were added
to the manuscript over the following years.
‘The darkness of the time’ Wittgenstein was alluding to was
indisputable; he was, after all, writing his preface towards the end
of a war that had brought total devastation to the world, killing

162
over 32 million civilians alone. But Wittgenstein did not have only
the war in mind and, indeed, when it was over in August 1945,
he saw no reason to join in the celebrations of victory, as he was
appalled by what he considered ‘the triumphant beastliness of the
Allies in Germany & Japan’. Already during the war he had written:
‘Things will be terrible when the war is over, whoever wins. Of
course, very terrible, if the Nazis won, but terribly slimy if the
Allies win.’33 And after the ceasefire:

Perhaps I ought to feel elated because the war is over. But I’m
not. I can’t help feeling certain that this peace is only a truce.
And the pretence that the complete stamping out of the ‘aggres-
sors’ of this war will make this world a better place to live in,
as a future war could, of course, only be started by them, stinks
to high heaven &, in fact, promises a horrid future.34

It may well be that the press reports about food shortages in

Germany and Austria were one reason for his dismissal of the
peace and the Allies, as Ray Monk suggests.35 But surely, compared
to anything the Axis had done in its occupied territories, the Allies
were an incomparably more humane force, at least the Western
ones. No horrid future was awaiting Western Europe (and Japan).
On the contrary: the Marshall Plan was soon implemented by the
us, leading to democracy and wealth in Germany and Austria. A
terribly slimy and horrid future was awaiting only Eastern Europe,
where the Soviet Union, Wittgenstein’s erstwhile land of dreams,
was about to install its iron rule. So what motivated his criticism?
It was not so much the immediate events, but his old Spenglerian
pessimism about the prospects of modern Western societies,
driven by the spell of science and technology, whose advent, in his
eyes, possibly marked the beginning of the end of humanity. He
had, since his return to philosophy in 1929, grown increasingly
adverse to scientism, the dogmatic application of scientific thinking

163
to every realm of thought, be it language, mathematics, psychology,
religion, anthropology or aesthetics. He had attempted to undermine
this multifaceted idolatry of science by showing that important
aspects of these disciplines are inaccessible to scientific theory-
building. His philosophy was thus opposed not only to particular
philosophical doctrines, but really to a much larger current, as he
had made clear in the preface to the Philosophical Remarks (1930):

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its
spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the
vast stream of European and American civilization in which all
of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards move-
ment, in building ever larger and more complicated structures;
the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter
what structure.

But even if we grant Wittgenstein this opposition to an exaggerated

adoration of science in philosophy and culture – was he really justi-
fied to reject the entire modern Western civilization, with its many
political, social and technical achievements? Can we really make
sense of the apocalyptic desire expressed in the following diary entry?

The hysterical fear over the atom bomb now being experienced,
or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at
last something really salutary has been invented. The fright at
least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine . . .
But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can
mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruc-
tion, of an evil, – our disgusting soapy water science . . . but
who could say what would come after this destruction?36

A diversion from this gloomy mood arose when, in 1945, he met

Ben Richards, a medicine student at King’s College, Cambridge,

164
 Wittgenstein with
his friend Ben
Richards in
London.

who was over 35 years younger than Wittgenstein. Ben had similar
qualities to Francis: he was kind, gentle, good-looking. Wittgenstein
fell deeply in love with him. Since Francis there had been nobody
else in his life, if we discount the case of Keith Kirk, a working-class
colleague of Francis to whom Wittgenstein gave lessons in mechan-
ics and mathematics in 1940. Wittgenstein was infatuated with
Kirk, but kept his feelings secret and nothing ever developed. With
Ben, however, the feelings seem to have been more mutual, leading
to a relationship that lasted, with ups and downs, for several years.37
Given that he felt old and worn-out this unexpected emotional out-
burst reinvigorated and inspired him, and made him forget about
his daily worries, in particular the dreaded duties of his academic
position. No doubt Ben’s love was very precious to him, a ‘great rare

165
gift’ and a ‘rare gem’, as he described it in his diary. But this love
also led to new trouble, since it made him depend again on another
human being. It seems that he was now less capable than before
to bear the hazards of love, experiencing despair and anxiety at the
slightest uncertainty, such as a missing letter.

Upset. No news from R. Every day I think about it and that I

should find the right attitude towards this loss. Nothing seems
more probable than that he has left me or is about to do it, and
nothing, in a sense, more natural. And I feel that I must let all
this happen as it is meant to, that I have done what I could and
that now it is out of my hand. It is a mark of a true love that one
thinks of what the other person suffers. For he suffers too, is also
a poor devil.38

Containing painful reflections on his situation, his diary entries

of the time are reminiscent of the period when he was in love with
Marguerite Respinger. ‘I am awfully depressed. Uncertain about
my whole future. My love story with Richards has totally exhausted
me. It has held me in its grip for the past nine months, almost like
madness.’39 It is noteworthy, however, that unlike his relationship
to Francis, no pangs of conscience accompanied Wittgenstein’s
love for Ben. Ray Monk has made the interesting conjecture that
Wittgenstein’s attitude to sexuality had changed during the war.
He had, for most of his life, held onto Weininger’s sharp distinc-
tion between sex and love. But by 1943 he had ceased to view
sex and love as incompatible, as an episode with Drury suggests.
Drury had recently visited Luxor Temple in Egypt and recounting
his journey to Wittgenstein he expressed his shock at a bas-relief
depicting Horus, the ancient god of the sky, with an erect phallus.
Wittgenstein’s reaction was to reject the implication that there
was something intrinsically repulsive about sexuality. ‘Why in the
world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that

166
act by which the human race is perpetuated? Not every religion
has to have St Augustine’s attitude to sex.’40 Can we take this as
evidence that Wittgenstein really changed his attitude to sex? It
may well be so, but since we do not know of other similar episodes
the evidence seems thin.
His love for Ben notwithstanding, Wittgenstein now found
life in Cambridge increasingly intolerable. ‘Everything about the
place repels me’, he noted in his diary. ‘The stiffness, the artifi-
ciality, the self-satisfaction of the people. The university atmos-
phere nauseates me.’41 More generally, he perceived the English
civilization as ‘disintegrating and putrefying’. He also felt much
lonelier now. Francis, Ramsey, Keynes were all dead, while Drury,
Malcolm and Rhees had left Cambridge. With Russell he had
nothing to do any more, neither personally nor philosophically.
Moore had suffered a stroke and his wife allowed him to talk to
Wittgenstein for at the most one-and-a-half hours, which enraged
Wittgenstein. Why should Moore not talk as much as he pleased?
‘If he became very excited or tired and had a stroke and died –
well, that would be a decent way to die: with his boots on.’42 In
addition, Wittgenstein was far from convinced that his teaching
was doing any good. ‘The only seed I am likely to sow is a certain
jargon’, he said in a lecture. And there was much truth to this,
since there was a cult surrounding Wittgenstein in Cambridge,
now considered the greatest living philosopher. As Gilbert Ryle
described his visits to the Moral Sciences Club: ‘veneration for
Wittgenstein was so incontinent that mentions, for example my
mentions, of other philosophers were greeted with jeers’.43 This
attitude was partly enforced by Wittgenstein himself, since he
apparently not only prided himself with not having studied much
history of philosophy, but also ridiculed those who had done so
as ‘academic philosophers’.
In the summer term of 1947 Wittgenstein decided to retire.
He planned to leave England and live by himself. The summer he

167
spent in Swansea, partly joined by Ben Richards, contemplating
where to go next, Ireland or Norway. Eventually he chose Ireland.
In September and October he visited his family in Vienna for the
first time in eight years. Knowing about the post-war depression
he dreaded seeing his native city again, and was indeed shocked
by its devastation. The capital of the old empire in whose army he
had once served was never to be the same again. What demoralized
him in particular was the brutality of the Russians in their sector,
where a lot of looting and raping was taking place. The Soviet
troops had also vandalized the house he had built for Margarete. If
Wittgenstein still had any illusions about the Soviets, he certainly
lost them now. Back in Cambridge, he officially resigned his chair
as from the end of the year, spent several more weeks at Trinity
College preparing a typescript on the philosophy of psychology,
and finally left for Dublin at the beginning of December. As he told
Malcolm, ‘I am in no way optimistic about my future but as soon
as I had resigned I felt that it was the only natural thing to have
done.’44

168
 8

Nothing is Hidden: Philosophical

Investigations

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big
thing.’ Isaiah Berlin once used this fragment by the Greek poet
Archilocus to explain the deep divide between two kinds of writers
and thinkers, indeed between two kinds of human beings. On the
one hand, there are the hedgehogs – those who have a central
vision, a coherent system, a universal principle, and relate every-
thing to it. There are, on the other hand, the foxes – those whose
thought moves on many levels, who are aware of the prodigious
richness of phenomena and who do not try fitting it all into
one unifying framework. Berlin classified Plato, Dante, Hegel,
Dostoevsky as hedgehogs, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe,
Joyce as foxes, and Tolstoy as a cross of both.1 But what about
Wittgenstein? He, too, cannot be unequivocally placed into one or
other category. By nature, he was a hedgehog, and his early work
bears witness to this. For in the Tractatus he strived, like all great
European metaphysicians, to encompass everything in a unifying
system, everything from the foundations of logic to the nature of
the world. But, as Peter Hacker has suggested, in his later work
Wittgenstein transformed himself through great intellectual effort
into a fox.2
Wittgenstein’s early work was a paradigmatic example of system-
building philosophy – his atomistic account of the essence of the
proposition was the foundation upon which he built his theory of
logic, language, ontology, mind and ethics. Everything was meant to

169
hang together through one key assumption, namely that the essence
of every elementary proposition is to describe a possible fact and to
be independent of any other elementary proposition. Consequently,
every statement had to be interpreted as a picture, even those that
at face value did not seem to be picturing anything. The early philos-
ophy was therefore analytical in a more literal sense: things are not
as they seem to be; their hidden real essence is revealed to us when
we step below the realm of appearances and analyse, that is, decom-
pose the statement or a fact we are interested in into its actual con-
stituents. True, the method employed for this, logical analysis, was
new, but the aim, or rather the dream, of revealing the essence of
things was as old as philosophy itself. It was the dream of establish-
ing philosophy as metaphysics, a super-science discovering the most
fundamental features of the world by means of the most rigorous
method. And it was a dream that the early Wittgenstein thought had
come true in his Tractatus.
But when, in 1929, he attempted to work out the programme of
logical analysis announced in the book, he realized that his dream
had been a chimera. His fundamental assumption proved to be
wrong: there is no such thing as the essence of proposition, no such
thing as the essence of language. And with it the entire logical,
semantical and ontological edifice so meticulously developed in the
Tractatus collapsed like a house of cards. By 1932 Wittgenstein had
abandoned most of his old doctrines. But it was not only his specific
doctrines that he came to reject – he demolished much of his earlier
conception of philosophy itself. The main point that remained
unchanged was his continuing belief that philosophy is not a
science about the world, but consists in the a priori clarification of
language. Among the major differences, by contrast, was his rejec-
tion of the metaphor of depth and the idea of a hidden essence,
for ‘Nothing is hidden’ (Philosophical Investigations [pi] §435). All
the philosopher is interested in lies in plain view. He need not dig
down beneath the phenomena, but must stay on the ground level

170
and draw a map of it. Geography replaces geology. This ground
level consists of our language and the concepts expressed by it,
including philosophically problematic ones like ‘proposition’,
‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’, ‘ability’, ‘intention’, ‘number’, etc. These
basic notions constitute our conceptual framework, the grid
through which we obtain knowledge about the world in both life
and science. But since Wittgenstein now believes that none of these
notions is more basic than the others, there can be no analysis in
the older sense of the word, that is, there is no building of a system
resting on one fundamental notion (‘proposition’ in the Tractatus),
with all the others being reduced to, derived from or explained by
it. All the philosopher has to do now instead is describe. He has to
describe how the philosophically relevant concepts are related to
each other, how ‘proposition’ and ‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘abil-
ity’, etc., connect with one another. The new descriptive–connec-
tive method is really more like the drawing of a map. Wittgenstein
employs the geographical metaphors himself in his Preface to the
Philosophical Investigations, for he says that the nature of his investi-
gation ‘compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross
in every direction. – The philosophical remarks in this book are, as
it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in
the course of these long and involved journeyings.’3 Later he writes:
‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets
and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions
from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new
boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses’ (pi §18).
This relates to another simile Wittgenstein gave his students in a
lecture:

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to

find your way round London. I have to take you through the city
from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the
embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I

171
 have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts
of directions, we shall have passed through any given street
a number of times – each time traversing the street as part of
a different journey. At the end of this you will know London;
you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner.4

Surveying our language in this way is not a self-contained

endeavour. Rather, we do it in order to solve philosophical problems
and puzzles. The later Wittgenstein is a truly linguistic philoso-
pher, for he believes that most, if not all philosophical problems
arise through a misunderstanding of our language.

People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really

progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical
problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t
understand why it had to be so. It is because our language has
remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same
questions. As long as there continues to be a verb ‘to be’ that
looks as if it functions in the same way as to ‘eat’ and ‘to drink’,
as long as we still have the adjectives ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’,
‘possible’, as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an
expanse of space, etc. etc., people will keep stumbling over the
same puzzling difficulties and find themselves starting at some-
thing which no explanation seems capable of clearing up.5

Consequently these difficulties and problems can only be solved,

or rather dissolved, if we obtain a clear understanding of how our
language works. This attitude has two connected implications. First,
many philosophical questions are nonsensical, based on confusions
about how certain words work. Once we clarify these confusions
and we make the underlying nonsense patent, the questions do not
get answered, but simply dissolve. Philosophy is thus to a large
degree negative. As Wittgenstein himself put it while reflecting on

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the nature of his thinking: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy’. Second,
in philosophy we do not investigate the world in a trivial sense. We
uncover or ‘show’ the metaphysical essence of the world, but only
understand how our language works by giving what Wittgenstein
calls a ‘perspicuous representation of its grammar’. Since this
involves giving an account of how individual expressions are
employed in various everyday contexts in life and the sciences,
knowledge about how and for which purpose words are used will
involve knowledge about the world. But this is knowledge that we
already have and that we simply recall or make explicit through
the realization of affinities and differences in the familiar grammar
of expressions. ‘Learning in philosophy is really recollecting. We
remember that we really did use words that way.’ This is a far cry
from traditional metaphysics and the metaphysics of the Tractatus.

What is philosophy? An enquiry into the essence of the world?

. . . What we are in fact doing is to tidy up our notions, to make
clear what can be said about the world. We are in a muddle
about what can be said, and are trying to clear up that muddle.
This activity of clearing up is philosophy.6

When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’,

‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the
thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually
used in this way in the language-game which is its original
home? – What we do is to bring words back from their meta-
physical to their everyday use [pi §116]. And this is what the
solution of all philosophical difficulties looks like. Our answers,
if they are correct, must be homely and trivial. But one must
look at them in the proper spirit, and then that doesn’t matter.7

This is a radically austere, disillusioning conception of philoso-

phy with no precedent. If it is true, then the way philosophy has

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been done for the past 2,500 years is to a large extent miscon-
ceived. Wittgenstein was aware of these historical implications,
despite his claim not to care about history. Thus, in a lecture in
1930 he described his philosophy as a new subject, a kink in the
development of human thought. ‘The nimbus of philosophy has
been lost. For we now have a method of doing philosophy, and
can speak of skilful philosophers. Compare the difference between
alchemy and chemistry; chemistry has a method and we can speak
of skilful chemists.’ And around the same time he wrote in his
diary: ‘If my name survives, then only as the terminus ad quem of
the great philosophy of the West. As the name of him who burnt
the library of Alexandria.’8 Unsurprisingly, this conception of
philosophy has met with much resistance since Wittgenstein’s
death and it is at the moment to a large extent rejected by analytic
philosophers. It is, contrary to the confidence in science character-
istic of our time, a conception that greatly narrows the range of
what we humans can know about the world through abstract
thought. It resembles to some extent Immanuel Kant’s critical phil-
osophy, that is, the denial that pure reason is capable of answering
the great metaphysical questions (about the existence of God, the
immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will). Wittgenstein,
however, is more radical than Kant, since he does not believe that
our cognitive powers are too restricted to answer metaphysical
questions, but that these very questions do not even make sense.
Not even God could answer such questions. Il faut cultiver notre
jardin – the modesty of Voltaire’s Candide, which appealed so
much to Kant, remains valid, but from Wittgenstein’s point of
view only because there is nothing else for philosophers outside
the garden of grammar.
This view of philosophy is sketched in some fifteen pages of the
Philosophical Investigations and applied in the rest of the book. Being
the fruit of sixteen years of hard work the book is overly complex
and cannot be summarized here in any detail.9 It may suffice,

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however, to describe the character of the book and give a few exam-
ples of how philosophy is done in it. To begin with, it is short, just
over 250 pages long in the English translation. From the ten thou-
sands of remarks Wittgenstein made in his manuscripts since 1929
he selected only a tiny fragment and grouped them in 693 apho-
rism-like sections. We could thus view the Investigations as the tip
of a massive iceberg. Three main areas are covered in the book:
philosophy of language (meaning, understanding, following a rule,
etc.), philosophy of mind (thinking, remembering, imagining,
intending, etc.) and the already mentioned nature of philosophy.
His extensive investigations into the philosophy of mathematics
are only touched upon.
The style of the book is very different from that of the Tractatus.
The prose is not so sibylline, but limpid and non-technical, with
striking metaphors and analogies, thought experiments, invented
language-games, rhetorical questions, soliloquies, etc. There are
also several fragments of dialogue between a ‘voice of error’ and
the ‘voice of correctness’ (which can often be construed as an
exchange between young Ludwig and his present self ), but it
would be a mistake to view the entire book as a Socratic dialogue
as some interpreters have done. For Wittgenstein was not a fan of
the genre: ‘Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what
a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that
prove nothing and clarify nothing?’10 Despite its clear style, the
book has a dark side, a side that has fascinated and exasperated
many readers. This is partly due to Wittgenstein’s preference for
‘the liberating word’ and his aversion to redundancy. His remarks
intimate more than they explicitly say, providing the reader with
the seed of a thought, not with a spelled-out argument. Nevertheless,
and despite his own liking of aphorists like Lichtenberg and Karl
Kraus, it would not be accurate to regard the Investigations as a
book of aphorisms, since it is a systematic and argumentative work
in theoretical philosophy. But one often loses sight of its system-

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aticity, because it is not always clear how the remarks connect and
which topic, target or philosopher they specifically address. There
is, in other words, no easily surveyable linear ‘narrative’, no imme-
diate transparency of the author’s intentions and convictions. This
poses serious although not insurmountable challenges to the reader.
The Investigations deals with a very wide range of subjects,
including the nature of the mind, intention, knowledge, thinking,
etc. But the central theme of the book is the nature of language.
It attempts to correct a hugely influential conception of language
that has dominated European philosophy for centuries, indeed a
conception that comes naturally to most humans when they begin
to reflect on language. According to this conception, which was
manifest in the Tractatus as well, the essence of language is to
depict and describe reality. More precisely, this conception can
be broken down into three main theses. First, the essential role
of words is to name objects; the meaning of a word is the object it
stands for. Second, language gets connected to the world via funda-
mental acts of naming; we point ostensively at an object and give
the word ‘A’ a meaning by saying ‘This is A’. Third, the essential
function of propositions is to describe how things are.
Wittgenstein argues in great detail against these theses and
their ramifications, not only in the Investigations, but also in his
writings on the philosophy of mathematics. First, he points out
that names are not the fundamental type of word, contrary to what
was explicitly assumed in the Tractatus or by Russell. Words do not
fulfil only the function of naming or referring to objects. Their
meaning is their use, roughly speaking (pi §43), and they can very
well have a use without referring to anything. ‘However’, ‘phlogis-
ton’ and ‘gone with the wind’ do not stand for any kind of object,
despite having a well-established use. Russell’s analysis of ‘The
present king of France is bald’ (see chapter Two) arose out of des-
peration: since the subject-term ‘the present king of France’ does
not refer to anything, he concluded that either it is meaningless,

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and thus the whole sentence is meaningless, or ‘the present king of
France’ is a pseudo-referring expression and the real structure of
the sentence is a totally different one, to be uncovered by logical
analysis. But once we realize that ‘the king of France’ has a perfectly
decent use whether or not it stands for anything, Russell’s problem
disappears and there is no need for his Theory of Descriptions.
Second, the act of naming is, although important, not funda-
mental. Indeed, it already presupposes mastery of a language.

[T]he ostensive definition explains the use – the meaning – of the

word when the overall role of the word in language is clear. Thus
if I know that someone means to explain a colour-word to me the
ostensive definition ‘That is called “sepia”’ will help me to under-
stand the word. – And you can say this, so long as you do not for-
get that all sorts of problems attach to the words ‘to know’ or ‘to
be clear’. One has already to know (or be able to do) something in
order to be capable of asking a thing’s name [pi §30].

Third, Wittgenstein points out that the traditional conception of

language dogmatically assumes that a certain type of propositions,
which has some predominance in science, that is, the declarative
subject-predicate-sentence (like ‘Pluto is a planet’), represents the
form of all sentences. But really, it is only one kind of proposition
among many others, not the most fundamental one. For language
does not have one function, but countless many. ‘Language is an
instrument. Its concepts are instruments’ (pi §569). ‘Look at the
sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment’ (pi
§421). And instruments have very different purposes. A prayer, a
joke, a plea do not describe facts. When I say ‘Buy me a diamond
ring!’ or ask ‘How many fudges shall I eat today?’ I am involved in
very different language-games from that of describing, namely the
language-game of ordering or that of asking questions respectively.
These language-games are not less fundamental than those of

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describing, but equally fundamental, and it is a grave mistake to
try to assimilate them to the language-game of describing. The
declarative subject-predicate sentence is not the fundamental form
of proposition.

But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion,

question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless
different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’,
‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given
once for all; but new types of language, new language-games,
as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete
and get forgotten . . . Here 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 §23].

Since there is no fundamental kind of word and sentence, it is

misleading to speak of the essence of language. The answer to the
question ‘What is language?’ dissolves into an open-ended list of
descriptions of various language-games. These language-games are
more or less connected to each other, without having one unique
feature in common. Wittgenstein compares the notion of language
with that of a game. Can we give a precise definition of what a
game is? What do all games have in common?

Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would

not be called “games”’ – but look and see whether there is any-
thing common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see
something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships,
and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but
look! – Look for example at board-games, with their multifari-
ous relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many
correspondences with the first group, but many common fea-
tures drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-

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 games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. –
Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses.
Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between
players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and
losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches
it again, this feature has disappeared [pi §66].

Wittgenstein argues that the multifarious relationships between

these games are like the similarities between the members of a fami-
ly. ‘Game’ is what Wittgenstein famously called a family resem-
blance concept, and its meaning cannot be captured by a definition.
Equally, ‘language’ is a family resemblance concept. Both concepts
lack sharp boundaries. But the vagueness of these concepts is only a
disadvantage if we think that the formal logic invented by Frege and
Russell must give us the standard of exactness or adequacy. There
is, however, no reason to believe this. Should we really say, as Frege
believed, that a word does not express a concept unless we can spec-
ify for any object in the universe whether it falls under the concept
or not? But that would not render only ‘game’ and ‘language’ use-
less, but also ‘chair’, ‘terrorist’, ‘old’ and ‘bald’. If, during a photo-
shoot, the photographer circumscribes a certain area with his hand
and says to the model ‘Stand roughly here’, is he being unintelligible?
Would he do better if he used gps technology? That would be
absurd and counterproductive. Vagueness is commonly part of the
usefulness of natural language. Indeed, even a concept such as that
of number is a family resemblance concept. From Wittgenstein’s
point of view, Frege’s monumental logicist project was based on the
failure to realize this.

Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it

has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hither-
to been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect
relationship to other things we call the same name. And we

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 extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist
fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in
the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but
in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say:
‘There is something common to all these constructions – name-
ly the disjunction of all their common properties’ – I should
reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well
say: ‘Something runs through the whole thread – namely the
continuous overlapping of those fibres’ [pi §67].

Incidentally, we see here how Wittgenstein attempts to convince

his interlocutor: by engaging him in a dialogue, giving him not
only general arguments, but also many concrete examples,
illuminating analogies, ironical replies. The Investigations is rich
in passages of this kind.
Another example of the kind of arguments employed in the
Investigations is Wittgenstein’s discussion of the privacy of one’s
inner states. These inner states seem to be so private and unique
that only I know what I am feeling. Others can only speculate. I
myself may be mistaken about all my perceptions about the exter-
nal world, but I am infallible as far as my inner world is concerned.
This idea of subjective privacy comes not only as the most natural
thing to most of us, but has been also very influential in European
philosophy, especially in modern times. Given this privacy, I could
even invent my own private language referring to my inner states
which nobody else in the world could understand. Indeed, our
ordinary language seems to be a kind of private language. For given
the conception of language discussed above (i.e., the idea that a
word has a meaning only insofar as it stands for some entity), one
could argue that words have a meaning because of their link to
internal mental states, emotions, pictures, ideas, etc. The meaning
of a word is thus construed as something private, accessible only
to the speaker himself – again a rather natural assumption of great

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historical influence. Witness for instance Locke in his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690): ‘Words, in their primary
or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the
mind of him that uses them . . . nor can anyone else apply them as
marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself
hath’.11 Humpty Dumpty puts it in Alice in Wonderland in a more
straightforward manner: ‘When I use a word, it means just what
I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
Through powerful arguments Wittgenstein demonstrates not
only that our ordinary language does not function in this way,
but also that there cannot be any private language, since this is an
incoherent idea (we shall skip his arguments here). Moreover, he
attacks the idea of privacy itself and thus a pivotal assumption of
European thought, showing how it rests on a misunderstanding
of the function of psychological notions. Not only does he reject
the idea that only I know what I am feeling, but he claims that really
only other people can know what I am feeling. In other words, he
actually rejects the claim that I know at all what I am feeling! By
this, however, he does not mean that I am ignorant of my feelings
either. Rather, it does not make sense to ascribe to me knowledge
of my inner states. He demonstrates this claim by means of the
descriptive method mentioned above. In other words, instead
of taking it as basic or explaining it in terms of other concepts,
Wittgenstein draws a map of the connections between knowledge
and related concepts. For instance, he shows that knowledge is con-
nected to the possibility of evidence, doubt, error, ignorance, etc. If
these possibilities are excluded, so is knowledge. If they are included,
so is knowledge. Take a case in which I have a headache and say
‘I am in pain’ while holding my head. It would surely make sense
for you to look for evidence (my facial expression, for instance)
whether I have a headache, but also to doubt this fact, err or
be ignorant about it. Hence, it makes sense to ascribe to you the
knowledge that I am in pain. But what about myself? Well, could I

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have a headache, but be ignorant about it and then find out about
it through evidence offered to me? What could such evidence be?
In what situation would it make sense to say of myself ‘I may be in
pain, but I doubt it’? And would it really be intelligible if I told my
doctor in all seriousness ‘Sorry, I was so sure a minute ago that I
am in pain, but I have just discovered that I am mistaken’? None of
this seems to work. The origin of the mistaken idea of privacy arises
through misunderstanding the role of statements like ‘I am in
pain’. For they look like ordinary descriptions of a state of affairs,
as in ‘I am at Marble Arch’. It is, of course, possible to find out that
or err that or doubt whether I am at Marble Arch and hence to
know that I am at Marble Arch. But for all the similarity between
‘I am at Marble Arch’ and ‘I am in pain’, the latter sentence serves
a very different function. ‘Pain’ is not the name of an inner, private
state, and the sentence therefore is not a description of an inner,
private state. Rather, ‘I am in pain’ is typically the expression or
avowal of pain.

A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him
and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the
child new pain-behaviour. ‘So you are saying that the word “pain”
really means crying?’ – On the contrary: the verbal expression of
pain replaces crying and does not describe it [pi §244].

A related topic discussed by Wittgenstein is the concept of think-

ing. Again, it comes very naturally to us to conceive of thinking as
a process happening inside our minds or brains, just as electronic
processes are happening inside, let us say, a computer. This process
inside us is supposed to be independent of any actual language we
speak, for example, English or Swahili, and when we actually speak,
we translate our inner thoughts into the public medium of language.
As Thomas Hobbes put it in his Leviathan (1651): ‘the general use of
speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of

182
thoughts into a train of words’.12 Indeed, this seems to explain how
a child learns the meaning of ‘thinking’ or ‘thought’: it hears these
words, looks inside itself and whatever it finds there is what ‘think-
ing’ refers to. This conception also allows for animals and computers
to think, even though they might not have a language comparable
to ours, if any. Again, Wittgenstein argues that this model of our
cognitive life and the relation between thought and language
resulting from it is not just simplistic but deeply mistaken. In
conjuring up this model we are fixated on a certain way words
receive their meaning, namely by pointing at something and then
giving it a name, and we try to press the concept of thinking into
this schema as well. But, Wittgenstein argues, this concept is nei-
ther learned nor used in this way, and unless we look carefully at
the diverse and complex contexts in which the concept of thinking
is actually used, we will at best achieve a caricature of this concept.
‘It would be as if without knowing how to play chess, I were to try
and make out what the word “mate” meant by close observation
of the last move of some game of chess’ (pi §316). We should be
much more careful about the limited applications of the concept
of thinking. ‘We only say of a human being and what is like one
that it thinks’ (pi §360).

The chair is thinking to itself: . . . WHERE? In one of its parts?

Or outside its body; in the air around it? Or not anywhere at
all? But then what is the difference between this chair’s saying
something to itself and another one’s doing so, next to it? – But
then how is it with man: where does he say things to himself?
How does it come about that this question seems senseless; and
that no specification of a place is necessary except just that this
man is saying something to himself? Whereas the question
where the chair talks to itself seems to demand an answer. – The
reason is: we want to know how the chair is supposed to be like
a human being; whether, for instance, the head is at the top of

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 the back and so on. What is it like to say something to oneself;
what happens here? – How am I to explain it? Well, only as you
might teach someone the meaning of the expression ‘to say
something to oneself ’. And certainly we learn the meaning of
that as children. – Only no one is going to say that the person
who teaches it to us tells us ‘what takes place’ [pi §361].

If Wittgenstein is right, then when neuroscientists ask

nowadays where our thinking is occurring, and then claim that it
is occurring inside our brains, what they are actually doing is not
treating a material object such as a chair like a human being, but a
human being more like a chair! For the question as to where my
thinking is taking place would otherwise not even arise. Is it really
the case that when I am completing my tax return at my desk, my
thinking is occurring in my brain, three inches behind my left eye?
And that if I were to start jumping up and down on a trampoline,
still thinking about my taxes, my thinking would also be bouncing
up and down? Does this nonsense not show that we have a mistaken
understanding of what thinking is? We should perhaps give up
the idea that ‘to think’ and its cognates are employed to report
or describe something that is going on inside me. How would the
child that is learning the meaning of ‘to think’ even know what to
look for inside itself? But is there not a ‘stream of consciousness’
going on inside me? Is this not thinking? Recording the ‘stream of
consciousness’ (if it is at all clear what the phrase means), as James
Joyce famously attempted in his Ulysses, has nothing to do with
reporting what one thinks. When I say ‘It is raining’, I do report
what I am thinking, namely that it is raining, but this is surely
something that is happening outside, not in me, even if my thinking
so is accompanied by all kinds of mental images or events. And
there are other meanings of the phrase ‘to think’. We must look
at all these meanings in detail in order to understand the widely
ramified concept of thinking.

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 Equally, the relation between thought and language is a very
complex one. If the translation model were correct, then our
thoughts must already be language-like, for how else could there be
a translation? Thinking would be a kind of speaking, only to one-
self, to one’s soul (an influential idea in the history of philosophy).
That would immediately open up the possibility of a person who
constantly and unintentionally mistranslates their own thoughts –
an absurdity. And would that ‘language of thought’ also have verb-
like, noun-like and preposition-like elements? How did they receive
their meaning? But if thoughts are not language-like, how are they
like? What are they made of? Let us take the thought expressed by
the following Cockney sentence: ‘Iran’s hard-line president on
Saturday inaugurated a heavy-water produckshun plant, a facility
th’ Wess fears will be used t’develop a nucular bomb, as Tehran
remained defiant ahaid of a un daidline thet c’d lead t’sanckshuns.’13
How could anybody even be able to entertain such a thought
without speaking Cockney or at least some related language?
Language is not just the clothing of thought, as Frege and the
young Wittgenstein believed, but actually a presupposition for
being able to have the articulate thoughts that we humans can
have. The limits of thought are the limits of its possible expression.
To put it in the extreme: there can be no thought without language.
If correct, this claim is of major significance for any understanding
of our mind, indeed for any anthropology. ‘We say a dog is afraid
his master will beat him; but not, he is afraid his master will beat
him tomorrow. Why not?’ (pi §650).
There are many other arguments and topics in the Philosophical
Investigations. But we get a sense of how philosophy is done in this
book and in general in Wittgenstein’s later work. It is done for the
purpose of preventing us from philosophical confusion by clarify-
ing our language. This clarification, however, is not trivial in any
way, but belongs to the most difficult intellectual activities.

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Philosophy unravels the thoughts in our thinking; hence its
result must be simple, but its activity as complicated as the
knots it unravels . . . You ask why grammatical problems are so
tough and seemingly ineradicable. – Because they are connected
with the oldest thought habits, i.e. with the oldest images that
are engraved into our language itself . . . Human beings are
deeply embedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical, confu-
sions. And freeing them from these presupposes extricating
them from the immensely diverse associations they are caught
up in. One must, as it were, regroup their entire language . . .
An entire mythology is laid down in our language.14

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 9

The Last Years, 1947–51

The last years in Wittgenstein’s life were productive but marked by

illness, loneliness and melancholia. He no longer had a home of his
own, staying with friends or in hotels. In 1940 he had written in his
diary ‘I feel more dead than alive’ and ‘I feel my life has an ugly end-
ing’, and this was no less true in 1947 at the time of his resignation.
As earlier in Norway, he now hoped to find solace through solitude
in Ireland. With interruptions, he lived in Ireland from December
1947 to June 1949. The first few weeks he spent with Drury in
Dublin, after which his friend arranged for him to stay with a family
in a farmhouse in Red Cross, County Wicklow. At times he man-
aged to write a good deal, mostly on the philosophy of psychology,
experiencing such an outburst of inspiration that ‘my ideas come
so quickly that I feel as if my pen was being guided’. He prayed
frequently, but his soul remained burdened. ‘Feel unwell’, he wrote
in February 1948. ‘Not physically, but mentally. Am frightened of
the onset of insanity. God alone knows whether I am in danger.’
Depression and the old guilt about Francis troubled him again.

Don’t let grief vex you! You should let it into your heart. Nor
should you be afraid of madness. It comes to you perhaps as
a friend and not as an enemy, and the only thing that is bad
is your resistance . . . Think a great deal of the last time with
Francis, of my odiousness towards him. I was at that time very
unhappy; but with a wicked heart. I cannot see how I will ever in
my life be freed from this guilt.1

187
Killary Bay, Connemara, Co. Galway, c. 1890–1900, a haunt of Wittgenstein’s in
Ireland.

Due to his nervous condition the farmhouse soon proved too

noisy for him. Drury offered Wittgenstein his holiday cottage in
Connemara, a district on the west coast of Ireland. The cottage, which
faced the sea, gave him much needed rest. He stayed here until
August and was looked after by Drury’s servant, Thomas Mulkerrins.
Wittgenstein went on long walks and was sometimes taken by
Mulkerrins in a boat to the sea. He rarely socialized. His neighbour-
ing family considered him so mad that they not only refused to have
anything to do with him, but also forbade him to walk on their land
for fear that he might scare their sheep.2 But he had no concern with
scaring sheep or other animals. On the contrary: he managed to tame
some wild birds so well that they came to the window of his cottage
and ate breadcrumbs out of his hand. Before he left Connemara,
he even left money for Mulkerrins to feed them. Unfortunately,
the birds’ encounter with Wittgenstein eventually proved fatal:
their tameness turned them into easy prey for the cats.3

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 After Connemara, Wittgenstein spent most of the time between
October 1948 and June 1949 in Dublin. There he lodged in Ross’s
Hotel, content that he had a comfortable and quiet room, and was
closer to Drury. Nevertheless, there were several other trips during
this period. He visited Richards in Uxbridge a few times and also
went to Cambridge. There he completed several manuscripts and
visited Georg Henrik von Wright, a former student now successor to
his chair in philosophy and fast becoming one of the most eminent
philosophers of his generation. In September 1948 Wittgenstein
travelled for three weeks to Vienna, where his sister Hermine was
terminally ill. ‘Mining is dying’, he wrote in his diary in February
1949. ‘A great loss for me and for everyone. Greater than I thought.’
And a few weeks later: ‘The roots on which my own life depend are
being severed all around me. My soul is filled with pain. She had
many and varied talents. Not exposed to the day, but hidden. As a
person’s qualities should be.’4 He visited Vienna twice more, once
in spring 1949 and finally from December 1949 to March 1950.
Wittgenstein’s own health was failing. Having intestinal trouble,
he went through a full check-up in Dublin in May 1949 and was
diagnosed with an atypical form of anaemia. Nevertheless,
Wittgenstein decided to undertake one final journey, this time to
Ithaca in the United States. Norman Malcolm, who was teaching at
Cornell University, had invited him on repeated occasions. To one
of these invitations Wittgenstein jokingly replied that he would
accept the invitation only if Malcolm would introduce him to Betty
Hutton, Wittgenstein’s favourite actress. Wittgenstein embarked
on the Queen Mary to New York in July, travelling third class.
Insisting, to no avail, that Malcolm should not pick him up on
arrival, Wittgenstein wrote to his friend: ‘Maybe, like in the films,
I’ll find a beautiful girl whom I meet on the boat & who will help
me.’ Wittgenstein stayed with the Malcolms for three months.
Overall, he enjoyed his stay. He wrote to Rhees in Swansea:

189
 Wittgenstein
with his Finnish
philosopher friend
Georg Henrik von
Wright.

There are some nice walks here though nothing compared with
the [G]ower coast. Nature here doesn’t look as natural as in
Wales. The only thing I really enjoy here is the engineering; that’s
superb. I like to see American machines. The people I’ve met
were often very nice but mostly, though not always, very foreign
to me.5

Although he himself felt that he was no longer capable of doing

philosophy, the philosophers he met at Cornell, for example Max
Black, John Nelson and Oets Bouwsma, received a different impres-
sion. He gave talks and attended, or rather dominated, numerous
seminars and discussions, dazzling everybody with his personality.
As Nelson remembers, an encounter with Wittgenstein was

probably the most philosophically strenuous two hours I have

ever spent. Under the relentless probing and pushing of his
inquiry my head felt almost as if it were ready to burst . . . There
was no quarter given – no sliding off the topic when it became

190
 difficult. I was absolutely exhausted when we concluded the
discussion.6

Wittgenstein was, according to Nelson, a mysterious and awesome

name at Cornell in 1949. When Max Black addressed Wittgenstein
during a lecture with ‘I wonder if you would be so kind, Professor
Wittgenstein’, a gasp went up from the audience. It was as if Black
had said ‘I wonder whether you would be so kind, Plato’.7
Wittgenstein’s longest discussions were with Malcolm and with
Bouwsma, a philosopher influenced by Moore.
With Malcolm he discussed problems relating to epistemology,
especially knowledge and scepticism, a topic he had not touched
upon since the Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s subsequent notes on these
themes, published as On Certainty in 1969, preoccupied him until his
death. They are numerous and original, but he never brought them to
a polished form. His answer to the traditional problem of scepticism
(How do I know that the world exists? How do I know that this tree
really exists?) was to some extent similar to what he had stated in the
Tractatus: ‘Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical,
when it tries to raise doubts where no question can be asked’
(Tractatus 6.51). Wittgenstein now gave not only more detailed argu-
ments supporting this thesis, but proposed a solution to the problem
of scepticism more in line with his later philosophy. He argued that
the sceptic does not genuinely question or doubt our ordinary know-
ledge and experience, but actually fails to pose any sensible question
at all. For the language-game of doubting is only learned by the child
against an undoubted background, and thus presupposes the latter.
You can only doubt something if you presuppose something else as
unquestionable. If you question everything at once, you are sawing
off the branch on which you are sitting and which allows you to doubt
something. The term ‘doubt’, as employed by the sceptic, is thus a
meaningless term, since it is taken out of its customary context.
This is missed both by the sceptic and by his opponent, for example,

191
a Cartesian philosopher, who first takes the sceptic’s radical doubt
seriously and then looks for true propositions, known with absolute
certainty, to counter the radical doubt. G. E. Moore, for instance,
argued that common-sense propositions like ‘This is a hand’ (while
raising his hand), ‘That’s a tree’ (while standing in front of one) or
‘The world has existed for many years’ are such absolutely certain
propositions which we can employ against the sceptic. Wittgenstein’s
answer is that in philosophical contexts these propositions do not
express any knowledge at all, but belong to our conceptual frame-
work, our world picture. Rejecting them is not like rejecting ‘Sushi is
increasingly popular in London’ or ‘Iran has peaceful intentions’,
rather it is like upsetting the entire world picture and thus the frame-
work within which the language-games of knowing and doubting
make sense at all. ‘If Moore were to pronounce the opposite of those
propositions which he declares certain, we should not just not share
his opinion: we should regard him as demented.’8 In short, what both
the sceptic and his Cartesian opponent really achieve is not radical
doubt and absolute knowledge respectively, but the dismissal of
rationality itself – not an insignificant insight in an age of far-reaching
conspiracy theories and historical revisionisms that have a lot in
common with the sceptic’s attitude to knowledge.
Wittgenstein’s discussions with Bouwsma touched on more
general issues as well. For instance, he stressed that there are some
similarities between his philosophy and psychoanalysis, in both
positive and negative respects. He thought that his teachings, like
Freud’s, had done more harm than good, seducing students to
believe in an all-solving ‘formula’. Wittgenstein also expressed his
dislike of Plato’s dialogues to Bouwsma:

The Socratic method! The arguments were bad, the pretence

of discussion too obvious, the Socratic irony distasteful – why
can’t a man be forthright and say what’s on his mind? As for the
Socratic method . . . it simply isn’t there. The interlocutors are

192
 ninnies, never have any arguments of their own, say ‘Yes’ and
‘No’ as Socrates pleases they should. They are a stupid lot.9

One evening Bouwsma took Wittgenstein to a hill overlooking the

town. Viewing the panorama Wittgenstein said something charac-
teristic of the unfathomable side of his personality: ‘If I had planned
it, I should not have made the sun at all. See! How beautiful! The sun
is too bright and too hot . . . And if there were only the moon there
would be no reading and writing.’10
While in Ithaca, Wittgenstein fell ill and had to undergo
examination in a hospital. Suspecting he might have cancer, he
feared that he would have to undergo surgery and not be able to
return to Europe. He said to Malcolm in frenzy: ‘I don’t want to die
in America. I am a European – I want to die in Europe . . . What a
fool I was to come.’11 Luckily, the examination turned out well and
Wittgenstein was able to return safely to England at the end of
October. After a brief stay in London he visited von Wright in
Cambridge. The plan was to return to Ross’s Hotel in Dublin.
But while in Cambridge he fell sick again and was once more
examined, this time by Dr Edward Bevan, the family doctor of
the von Wrights and an acquaintance of Drury. Soon after this
examination Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm:

Dear Norman, Thanks for your letter! The doctors have now
made their diagnosis. I have cancer of the prostate. But this
sounds, in a way, much worse than it is, for there is a drug
(actually some hormones) which can, as I’m told, alleviate the
symptoms of the disease, so that I can live on for years. The
doctor even tells me that I may be able to work again, but I can’t
imagine that. I was in no way shocked when I heard I had cancer,
but I was when I heard that one could do something about it,
because I had no wish to live on. But I cou[l]dn’t have my wish.
I am treated with great kindness by every one & I have an

193
 immensely kind doctor who isn’t a fool either. I think of you &
[your wife] often with gratitude . . . Affectionately, Ludwig12

He was prescribed oestrogen, which was supposed to prolong his

life for several years, and some time later received x-ray treatment.
As he commented to Rhees, ‘Another year of this half-life would
have been ample.’13 Initially, Wittgenstein kept his illness a secret
from most people around him, including his family. He flew to
Vienna for Christmas to be with Hermine, who died in February
1950, and returned to England a month later. For the remaining
year of his life he stayed with various friends, while continuing,
with interruptions, either to revise his existing manuscripts or even,
despite his physical condition, to work on new material, especially
on epistemology and colours. From April to October 1950 he lodged
in Oxford, at 27 St John Street, with Elizabeth Anscombe, his
former pupil and probably the most eminent female philosopher
of the twentieth century. It was here that he re-read Shakespeare’s
works, for which he had a restrained admiration.

[I]f Shakespeare is great, his greatness is displayed only in the

whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language and
world. In other words he is completely unrealistic. (Like a
dream.) . . . I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare, never
do anything with him . . . ‘Beethoven’s great heart’ – nobody
could speak of ‘Shakespeare’s great heart’ . . . People stare at
him in wonderment, almost as a spectacular natural phenome-
non. They do not have the feeling that this brings them into
contact with a great human being. Rather with a phenomenon.14

Wittgenstein befriended another lodger in Anscombe’s house,

Barry Pink, who, like Anscombe and other friends of Wittgenstein,
was a convert to Catholicism. During one of their intimate conversa-
tions, Pink asked Wittgenstein whether his philosophy had anything

194
Wittgenstein’s last
entry in his diary,
two days before
his death.

to do with his homosexuality. Such questions have been asked after

Wittgenstein’s death. Colin Wilson, for instance, has suggested that
young Wittgenstein’s inability to resist homosexual tendencies pro-
duced in him ‘the craving for certainty that lead him to create the
philosophical system of the Tractatus’.15 This is of course plain non-
sense. The theory of logic proposed in Wittgenstein’s early book or
his complex elucidations of natural language and the foundations of
mathematics given in his later work have as much to do with his sexu-
ality as Kant’s transcendental idealism with his (largely) chaste life or
Einstein’s theory of relativity with his various extra-marital affairs. We
would certainly be able to understand, discuss, approve or refute the
works of all these thinkers even if we swapped their ‘sexual identities’
(Wittgenstein as an unfaithful husband, Kant a troubled homosexual
and Einstein as a chaste bachelor). No wonder that Wittgenstein
dismissed Pink’s question angrily with a ‘Certainly not!’16
While in Oxford Wittgenstein felt that his life was coming to an
end, and he asked Anscombe to put him in touch with a Catholic
priest, Father Conrad Pepler. As the latter remembers, Wittgenstein

195
 wanted to talk to a priest and did not wish to discuss philosoph-
ical problems. He knew he was very ill and wanted to talk about
God, I think with a view to coming back fully to his religion, but
in fact we had, I think, only two conversations on God and the
soul on rather general terms.17

The possibility that Wittgenstein might have wanted to embrace

the Catholic faith, in which he had been baptized, might be doubted
given his avowed inability to believe that its doctrines were literally
true. But it is not impossible. The episode shows that in the last
months of his life Wittgenstein was perhaps driven by a will to
believe, representative of his lifelong concern with religious
matters. It also shows that he took such matters to be sharply
distinguished from philosophy.
In October 1950 Wittgenstein undertook his last long journey,
travelling with Ben Richards to Norway for a month. They stayed in
his old hut and, when Richards fell ill, with Wittgenstein’s old host,
Anna Rebni. Wittgenstein greatly enjoyed this stay and decided to
come back soon on his own. However, this and similar plans for a
solitary existence were thwarted when his health began to decline
rapidly in January 1951. After examination it was understood that he
had only a few months to live and medication terminated. He need-
ed constant care now, but was horrified at the prospect of having to
die in a hospital. In these circumstances Dr Bevan came forward
with a remarkably generous offer: he invited Wittgenstein to spend
his last days in Bevan’s house in Cambridge – without any payment.
Wittgenstein accepted and moved into his last home in February.
He was looked after by Bevan’s wife, who not only prepared his
baths and provided him with food and books, but also bought him
his much beloved Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine18 and
accompanied him every evening to the local pub, where they had
friendly, unpretentious chats. Remarkably, in his two months with
the Bevans Wittgenstein experienced one last outburst of creativity,

196
Wittgenstein’s
grave in
Cambridge.

composing the second half of the remarks of On Certainty, many of

which betray the best features of his writing: clarity and incisive-
ness. In an unusually self-ironical passage he even poked fun at him-
self: ‘I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislay-
ing something and having to look for it again; now her spectacles,
now her keys’.19 His last entry in his last diary, a reflection on believ-
ing, dreaming and losing one’s consciousness, occurred a day after
his 62nd birthday and two days before his death. He died on the
morning of 29 April 1951. Before he lost consciousness he told Mrs
Bevan: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life’. On the decision of his
Catholic friends he was given a Catholic burial at St Giles’s Church,
Cambridge.

197
 10

The Aftermath

Wittgenstein left the task of editing and publishing his gigantic

Nachlass, that is, his notebooks, manuscripts and typescripts
amounting to 20,000 pages, to his literary executors, Anscombe,
Rhees and von Wright. After his death the publication of his works
was an urgent matter, since his later ideas were known only to a
small circle of devotees and otherwise only from hearsay. In 1953
Philosophical Investigations was finally published, in a bilingual
version, with the English translation by Anscombe. Many reviewers
soon praised the book. Peter Strawson, for instance, starts his
review of the Investigations, one of the very first, with the following
lines:

This book is a treatment, by a philosopher of genius, of a

number of intricate problems, intricately connected. It also
presents in itself an intricate problem: that of seeing clearly
what the author’s views are on the topics he discusses, and
how these views are connected.1

Over the next decades many more volumes of his writings, lectures
and conversations came out. Finally in 2001 his entire Nachlass,
including facsimiles of all his manuscripts, was published in a
cd-rom version.
Up to the 1970s Wittgenstein’s influence upon the development
of philosophy was decisive, especially in Oxford, a stronghold of post-

198
war analytic philosophy, where some of his pupils and collaborators,
such as Anscombe, Toulmin and Waismann, taught side by side with
a generation of younger thinkers influenced by or sympathetic to
Wittgenstein’s works. In Cambridge he was succeeded in his chair
first by von Wright, then by John Wisdom and finally by Anscombe.
Wittgenstein’s influence spread from Britain to the rest of the English-
speaking world. In the US Norman Malcolm and Max Black trans-
formed the philosophy faculty at Cornell into one of the leading
departments in the country. Erik Stenius, Georg Henrik von Wright
and Jaakko Hintikka ensured the transmission of his ideas in
Scandinavia. On the Continent interest in his work arose more slowly,
partly due to lack of interest in analytic philosophy and the influence
of other philosophers, such as Husserl and Heidegger. His work was
also well received in Asia, particularly in Japan and more recently in
China. At the time of his greatest influence in the Anglo-Saxon world
many branches of philosophy were affected by his work, including
some about which he had written little to nothing, such as the
philosophy of the social sciences and moral, legal and political
philosophy. His strongest impact, however, affected the core
disciplines of theoretical philosophy, especially philosophy of logic,
language and mind (not, however, philosophy of mathematics). His
conception of philosophy as a non-scientific linguistic investigation
of our conceptual framework was also influential. In those days
there was an assumption among his supporters that armed with
Wittgenstein’s method one could finally get down to business and
solve the great problems of philosophy. As Anthony Kenny has put
it in retrospect, they ‘had imagined that once his philosophical ideas
had been absorbed, thinkers in various disciplines would begin to
apply them, with beneficial effect, to work in their own field’.2
Ironically, however, just when Wittgenstein’s oeuvre became
more and more accessible, the influence of his ideas declined
among academic philosophers. The most important reason for this
is the fact that his ideas were submerged by the rise of new meta-

199
physics and scientifically inspired philosophy, which emanated
particularly strongly from the US, where philosophers such as
Willard van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Saul
Aaron Kripke and Noam Chomsky were active. Equally important
for the development of Anglo-American philosophy was the
emergence of new scientific disciplines such as computer science,
molecular and evolutionary biology, neuroscience and cognitive
psychology. It is likely that Wittgenstein would have perceived
such scientification of philosophy as symptomatic of the malaise
of modernity. He once said to Drury: ‘My type of thinking is not
wanted in this present age; I have to swim so strongly against the
tide. Perhaps in a hundred years people will really want what I am
writing.’3 The future will tell. To be sure, the Tractatus and the
Investigations are today regarded as classics. In a 1998 poll among
professional philosophers, Wittgenstein was ranked fifth among
the all-time greats, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche, and
ahead of Hume and Descartes. And another poll, conducted in
2000, resulted in the Philosophical Investigations being voted as
the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century,
with the Tractatus ranking as fourth. But nominal popularity does
not mean philosophical dominance. On the contrary: a glance at
the leading philosophy journals will show that his philosophy,
particularly his later philosophy, is today being marginalized.
In the light of the 10,000 books and articles published on
Wittgenstein by the end of the twentieth century such claims may
seem implausible. After all, Wittgenstein’s works need to be edited
and interpreted just as much as, for instance, Aristotle’s or Kant’s
works. But the ‘Wittgenstein industry’ goes beyond what is necessary
and almost obscures access to Wittgenstein’s thought by producing
countless competing interpretations, philological debates, new
‘readings’, introductions, textbooks for students, collections of
papers, conference proceedings, dissertations, etc. This industry pro-
duces with remarkable regularity titles such as The New Wittgenstein,

200
Wittgenstein’s Poker, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, The Third Wittgenstein,
Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes, Wittgenstein Flies a Kite, etc. Looking at
this scholastic output, one sometimes gets the impression that it is
diametrically opposed to what Wittgenstein hoped to achieve. For
he surely did not want to create a branch of specialists writing about
him and his works, but to revolutionize philosophy itself.
However, the fact that Wittgenstein scholarship is flourishing,
while Wittgensteinian philosophy has withered, may also be due
to the problem ‘of seeing clearly what the author’s views are’, as
Strawson put it in the review mentioned above. For a major difficulty
with Wittgenstein’s work lies in the unusual character of his writ-
ings, which invite conflicting readings and endless controversies. We
may wonder whether Wittgenstein’s attitude to philosophical prose,
the intrusion of aesthetic criteria into his discourse, has not been
detrimental to the reception of his work. It is noteworthy that he
was himself more critical of his style than some of his contemporary
supporters, as a sequence of remarks from the 1940s demonstrates.
In 1941 he wrote in his diary ‘My style is like bad musical composi-
tion’, while in 1945 he admitted in the Preface to the Philosophical
Investigations that the best that he could write would never be more
than philosophical remarks. In 1948 he noted down a striking simile:

Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not
better than a cake; & someone who is in a position to give us a
bag full of raisins still cannot bake a cake with them, let alone
do something better. I am thinking of Kraus & his aphorisms,
but of myself too & my philosophical remarks. A cake is not as
it were: thinned out raisins.4

Wittgenstein’s attempt to combine philosophical arguments with

the perfect expression, ‘the liberating word’, is not unique in modern
philosophy. We find it in various forms in Continental philosophers,
for instance in Hegel, Hölderlin or Nietzsche, and more expressly

201
 The opening page
from Elizabeth
Lutyens’s piece
of 1952–3 for
unaccompanied
voices, Motet
Excerpta Tractati
Logico-Philosophici
(known as the
‘Wittgenstein
Motet’).

so in twentieth-century figures like Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno

and Derrida, thinkers who, to various degrees and for different
rationales, expressly chose particular styles of writing. The height-
ened self-awareness of the act of writing is actually a very modern
trait, to be found not only in philosophy, but even more so in liter-
ature, if we think only of writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust
or André Gide. Wittgenstein fits well in this modernist current,
although his case is unique, since in important respects he belongs
to analytic philosophy, a philosophical current that has greater
affinities to logic, mathematics and natural science than to
Continental philosophy and literature.5 The Janus-faced trait of his
oeuvre, which results from his affinities to two different intellectual
currents, makes it fascinating, but also poses great difficulties to its
interpretation, and this may partly explain the ‘industry’ surrounding
his work.

202
 So much for Wittgenstein’s standing within academic philoso-
phy at present. Like Freud’s, however, Wittgenstein’s impact
reached far beyond academia. Already a legend in his own lifetime,
in the age of pop culture Wittgenstein has become almost a pop
star, ‘the thinking man’s hero’, as a television programme put it.
A motet based on the Tractatus was composed by Elizabeth Lutyens
and a Tractatus Suite by M. A. Numminem. Eduardo Paolozzi
etched a set of prints entitled ‘Wittgenstein in New York’, while
Derek Jarman directed the successful film Wittgenstein, based on
a script by Terry Eagleton. Several novels inspired by his life were
published, such as Wittgenstein’s Nephew by the congenial Austrian
writer Thomas Bernard, Malina by the equally congenial Austrian
poet Ingeborg Bachmann (who also lectured on Wittgenstein and
Heidegger) and The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy. Moreover,
the sibylline remarks of the Tractatus, especially those on ethics,
and the numerous striking aphorisms from his later period have
appealed to a wide audience and are often quoted. Alas, they are
rarely understood, given that they are mostly not self-sufficient
aphorisms, but the rhetorical tips of a vast iceberg of systematic
thought. More recently, Wittgenstein has been also portrayed as
a postmodernist, a relativist, a poet (or even as a Pyrrhonist, Zen-
Buddhist or rabbinical thinker). These are strange interpretations
of a man who towards the end of his life said that his chief contri-
bution had been in the philosophy of mathematics:6 a man who in
his youth vowed that he did not intend ‘to prove this and that, but
to find out how things really are’7 and who later said: ‘I know my
method is right. My father was a businessman, and I am a business
man: I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something
done, to get something settled.’8 All this does not square well with
postmodernist wariness, insecurity and quietism.
Nevertheless, there is something understandable about the
popular fascination with Wittgenstein, the alluring archetype of
a tormented thinker.

203
 From time to time in our culture, literary and artistic figures
become objects of veneration in circles far wider than the reach
of their works. Their lives are held to be of deeper significance
than the mere fascination of their biography. Their travails and
their intellectual and spiritual strivings are inchoately sensed to
incorporate and to represent the deepest tensions and conflicts
within the culture of their times. So, perhaps, it has been with
Ludwig Wittgenstein.9

This, then, may explain our fascination with Wittgenstein: that

despite his intellectual achievements, he never found his Sitz im
Leben, his place in life – like modern man. He strove to be perfect,
but his life remained a fragment, rich in triumphs, contradictions
and failings. It was in this sense that his life was beautiful, or rather
paradigmatic. ‘After somebody has died we see his life in a concilia-
tory light. His life looks well-rounded through a haze. For him it
was not well-rounded however, but jagged & incomplete. For him
there was no reconciliation; his life is naked & wretched.’10

204
Karl Johnson in the title role of Derek Jarman’s 1983 film Wittgenstein, shown
in a cage – with a parrot in another cage.
 References

1 Family and Early Years, 1889–1911

1 For more, see E. Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist. Culture and
Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, ct, and London, 1986),
pp. 3–39.
2 U. Weinzierl, ‘Der Fluch des Hauses Wittgenstein’, Die Welt (5 July 2003).
3 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 13.
This is based on what Wittgenstein had told Rush Rhees, who in turn
told it to Ray Monk.
4 B. McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford,
2005), p. 26.
5 M. Nedo and M. Ranchetti, Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten
(Frankfurt, 1983), p. 54.
6 M. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Personal Recollections, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1981), p. 27.
7 K. Cornish, The Jew of Linz (London, 1998).
8 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 15.
9 See B. Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (Oxford,
1999).
10 Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 2.
11 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 16.
12 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, pp. 47–8.
13 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 498.
14 Ibid., p. 78.
15 Ibid., p. 23.
16 Ibid., pp. 23ff.
17 Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
p. 106.

206
18 O. Weininger, Sex and Character (London, 1906), p. 147.
19 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, p. 54.

2 Cambridge, Norway and Philosophy, 1911–14

1 H. R. Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics (London, 1899), pp. 7–8.

2 B. McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford,
2005), pp. 73–4.
3 There are recent attempts to revive Frege’s logicism, most notably by
George Boolos and Crispin Wright.
4 Since Wittgenstein’s letter has not survived, we do not know what his
attempted solution was.
5 E. Anscombe and P. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford, 1967), p. 130.
6 For a possible interpretation of this matter, see McGuinness, Young
Ludwig, pp. 89–92.
7 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 16 March 1912; R. Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 43.
8 B. Russell, Autobiography (London, 2000), p. 329.
9 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 48.
10 See McGuinness, Young Ludwig, pp. 127–8.
11 David Pinsent, Diary, 30 May 1912.
12 Ibid., 25 August 1913.
13 Ibid., 12 July 1912.
14 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 5 September 1912.
15 Pinsent, Diary, 5 September 1912.
16 See McGuinness, Young Ludwig, pp. 53, 122–3.
17 Ibid., p. 123.
18 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 63.
19 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 13 October 1912; Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, p. 53.
20 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 9 November 1912; Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, p. 65.
21 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 27 May 1913; Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
pp. 81–2.
22 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1916; Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
pp. 80–81.

207
23 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions (Indianapolis, in, 1993),
pp. 2–3.
24 For Wittgenstein’s relation to Norway, see K. S. Johannessen,
R. Larsen and K. O. Åmås, Wittgenstein and Norway (Oslo, 1994).
25 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 86.
26 L. Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters, ed. B. McGuiness and G. H. von
Wright (Oxford, 1995).
27 Letter to Lucy Mary Donnelly, 19 October 1913; McGuinness, Young
Ludwig, p. 184.
28 Goodstein, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language, ed.
A. Ambrose and M. Lazerowitz (London, 1972), pp. 271–2.
29 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), p. 87e.
30 Letter to Russell, presumably December 1913, in Wittgenstein,
Cambridge Letters.
31 Letter to Russell, January 1914, ibid.
32 Letter to Russell, February 1914, ibid.
33 Letter to Moore, 7 May 1914, ibid.
34 Constantin Noica (1909–1987), Romanian philosopher. See G. Liiceanu,
The Paltinis Diary (Budapest, 2000).
35 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 107.
36 Letter to Ficker, 13 February 1915, ibid., p. 110.
37 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, p. 209.
38 A. Sarnitz, Adolf Loos (London, 2003).

3 In the Trenches, 1914–18

1 ms 101, 25 October 1914. All manuscript references refer to

Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (Bergen and Oxford, 2000).
2 ms 101, 18 August 1914.
3 ms 101, 13 September 1914.
4 ms 102, 8 December 1914.
5 B. McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford,
2005), p. 238.
6 ms 103, 4 May 1916.
7 ms 103, 29 March 1916.
8 ms 103, 30 April 1916.

208
 9 ms 103, 30 March 1916.
10 ms 103, 11 June 1916.
11 ms 103, 6 July 1916.
12 ms 103, 30 July 1916.
13 ms 103, 28 August 1916.
14 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, p. 242.
15 Ibid., p. 252.
16 ms 103, 7 October 1916. Sub specie aeternitatis means ‘under the aspect
of eternity’.
17 B. McGuinness, Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers (London,
2002), p. 34.
18 Ibid., pp. 34–5.
19 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, p. 263.
20 Ibid., p. 264.
21 ms 102, 16 March 1915.

4 Logic and Mysticism: The Tractatus

1 See, e.g., M. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the

Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago, il, 1996); D. Rozema, ‘Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus: A “Poem” by Ludwig Wittgenstein’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, lxiii/2 (2002).
2 See T. Eagleton, ‘Introduction to Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein:
The Terry Eagleton Script; The Derek Jarman Film (Worcester, ma, 1993),
p. 5.
3 L. Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript: ts 213 (Oxford, 2005), p. 302e.
4 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), p. 39e.
5 Ibid., p. 24e.
6 R. Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1984), p. 159.
7 Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 27 May 1912; R. Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 54.
8 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 178.
9 Letter to Russell, 19 August 1919; L. Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters,
ed. B. McGuiness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford, 1995).

209
 5 The Wilderness Years, 1918–29

1 Letter to von Ficker, October 1919; B. McGuinness, Young Ludwig:

Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford, 2005), p. 287.
2 McGuinness, Young Ludwig.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 274.
5 Ibid., p. 280.
6 Letter to Russell, 6 October 1919; L. Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters,
ed. B. McGuiness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford, 1995).
7 Letter to Engelmann, 30 May 1920; P. Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig
Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford, 1967).
8 W. W. Bartley iii has made the allegation that Wittgenstein felt so low
because he could not stay away from an area in the city’s park frequent-
ed by homosexual young men. Bartley does not produce any evidence
for this allegation. See Bartley, Wittgenstein (La Salle, il, 1986), and, for
a critical discussion, R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
(London, 1990), pp. 581ff.
9 Letter to Russell, 6 August 1920; Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters.
10 Letter to Russell, 20 September 1920; Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters.
11 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 194.
12 Ibid., p. 196.
13 Ibid., pp. 195–6.
14 Letter to Engelmann, 2 January 1921; Engelmann, Letters.
15 See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 181.
16 B. Russell, Autobiography (London, 2000), p. 332.
17 R. Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford, 1981),
pp. 127–8.
18 Ramsey to his mother, 20 September 1923; quoted in Monk, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, p. 216.
19 See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 234.
20 See, e.g., E. C. Hargrove, ‘Wittgenstein, Bartley, and the Glöckel School
Reform’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, xviii (1980), p. 461. See also
Bartley, Wittgenstein.
21 Engelmann, Letters, pp. 114–15.
22 Like other original manuscripts and editions, the dictionary is now a
much valued item among collectors. In 2005 the proofs of the dictionary

210
 sold for £75,000.
23 See J. Hintikka, On Wittgenstein (Belmont, ca, 2000).
24 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 235.
25 Funnily enough, companies now sell door handles à la Wittgenstein.
26 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 236.
27 See B. Leitner, The Wittgenstein House (New York, 2000); H. Eakin, ‘In
Vienna, a New View of Wittgenstein Home’, New York Times (28 August
2003).
28 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), pp. 37e–38e.
29 ‘Architekturzentrum Wien’, www.nextroom.at/building_article.
php?building_id=2338&article_id=2967 (accessed June 2006). See also
Leitner, The Wittgenstein House, for this reading.
30 See W. Wang, ‘The Wittgenstein House – Review’, Architectural Review
(September 2001); P. Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (London,
1994).
31 Letter to Margarete, September 1949; quoted in Wang, ‘The
Wittgenstein House’.
32 L. Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions (Lanham, md, 2003), p. 25.
33 Ibid., pp. 33–4.
34 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 318.
35 Ibid., p. 339.
36 Ibid., p. 239.
37 Ibid., p. 314.
38 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, pp. 18e–19e.
39 Ibid., p. 13e.
40 N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2001), p. 35.
41 See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 316–17.
42 McGuinness, Young Ludwig, pp. 48–9.
43 D. Stern, ‘The Significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’,
Inquiry, xliii (2000), p. 398. See also Stern, ‘Was Wittgenstein a Jew?’, in
Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. J. Klagge (Cambridge, 2001).

6 Return to Cambridge and Philosophy, 1929–39

1 M. Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York, 1995), p. 98.

2 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), p. 6e.

211
 3 Ibid., p. 56e.
4 M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, ct, and London,
2000), pp. 40–41.
5 M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford, 1962), pp. 230–31.
6 Wittgenstein quoted in F. Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle:
Conversations (Oxford, 1979), p. 68.
7 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 271.
8 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 17e.
9 N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2001), pp. 57–8.
10 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 256.
11 Both letters from 12 March 1933; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel
(Innsbruck, 2004).
12 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 263.
13 Ibid., p. 262.
14 Ibid., p. 263.
15 M. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London, 2005).
16 K. T. Fann, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy
(New York, 1967), p. 67.
17 L. Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture on Ethics’, in Philosophical Occasions
(Indianapolis, in, 1993), pp. 42ff.
18 B. Russell, Autobiography (London, 2000), p. 440.
19 Wittgenstein’s exchanges with Turing are recorded in L. Wittgenstein,
Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939 (Ithaca,
ny, 1976).
20 V. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals
(Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 52.
21 Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 25.
22 Ibid., p. 26.
23 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 57e.
24 L. Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions (Lanham, md, 2003),
p. 31.
25 F. Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations
(Oxford, 1979), p. 26.
26 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, p. 119.
27 Ibid., pp. 123, 125, 131.
28 Letter to Wittgenstein, 20 October 1933, in Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel.
29 Letter to Wittgenstein, 6 December 1936, in Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel.

212
30 Only one such encounter is mentioned, in ms 118, 22 September
1937.
31 ms 120, 2 December 1937.
32 See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Appendix.
33 ms 133, 26 October 1946.
34 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 427.
35 ms 125, 28 December 1941.
36 ms 133, 10 November 1946.
37 See Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 342.
38 R. Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford, 1981),
p. 35.
39 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 6e.
40 M. Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Frankfurt,
1982), p. 25.
41 One of his students, Casimir Lewy, is said to have described
Wittgenstein as politically naïve.
42 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 353.
43 R. Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford, 1981),
p. 158.
44 M. Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (London,
2002), p. 21.
45 See K. S. Johannessen, R. Larsen and K. O. Åmås, Wittgenstein and
Norway (Oslo, 1994).
46 ms 183, 19 February 1937.
47 ms 120, 12 December 1937.
48 See L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief (Oxford, 1966), on these lectures.
49 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 85e.
50 Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, p. 211.
51 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 56.
52 Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, p. 203.
53 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 70.
54 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 86e.
55 M. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Rhees, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, p. 79.

213
 7 Professorship and Wartime, 1939–47

1 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 343.

2 Ibid., p. 386.
3 ms 120, 14 March 1938. Wittgenstein was not actually a German citizen,
since it was precisely the scope of the Nuremberg Laws to outstrip
German Jews of their citizenship. He was what the Nazi law called a
‘national’, as opposed to a ‘Reich citizen’.
4 ms 120, 16 March 1938.
5 Letter to Keynes, 18 March 1938; L. Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters,
ed. B. McGuiness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford, 1995).
6 Ambrose remained faithful to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and published
several other articles on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics,
which to this day present some of the most authoritative descriptions
of his ideas on the subject. See A. Ambrose, Essays in Analysis (London,
1966).
7 R. Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford, 1981),
p. 156.
8 Letter to Eccles, 27 March 1938; Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel
(Innsbruck, 2004).
9 L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and
Religious Belief (Oxford, 1966), p. 11, 17.
10 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford 1980), p. 56e.
11 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 8.
12 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 431.
13 Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 159.
14 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 433.
15 See Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations.
16 Ibid., p. 24.
17 Ibid., p. 51.
18 Ibid., p. 51.
19 Ibid., p. 43.
20 ms 133, 31 October 1946. It is true that around this time Wittgenstein
also said that his own philosophy was akin to psychoanalysis. But the
similarities should not be overstressed. See P. Hacker, ‘Gordon Baker’s
Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and His Interpreters,
ed. G. Kahane, E. Kanterian and O. Kuusela (Oxford, 2007). For more on

214
 Wittgenstein on Freud, see J. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The
Myth of the Unconscious (Princeton, nj, 1995).
21 Helen Andrews to Ray Monk; see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
pp. 449–50.
22 N. Bachtin, Lectures and Essays (Birmingham, 1963).
23 Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 28.
24 See his essay ‘Aristotle versus Plato’ in Bachtin, Lectures and Essays.
25 See T. Eagleton, ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’, New Left Review, i/35 (1982).
26 L. Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge,
1939 (Ithaca, ny, 1976), p. 15.
27 Today the university hosts a Centre for Wittgensteinian Studies
and edits a journal dedicated to the philosopher, Philosophical
Investigations.
28 See also his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and Last Writings on
the Philosophy of Psychology, posthumously published in four volumes.
29 Letter to Malcolm, 15 December 1945.
30 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 463.
31 Ibid.
32 Letter to Malcolm, 20 September 1945; Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel.
33 B. McGuinness, Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers (London,
2002), p. 51.
34 Letter to Malcolm, around 20 August 1945.
35 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 480.
36 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, pp. 48e–49e.
37 Currently, Wittgenstein’s diary entries are the only source of informa-
tion about the relationship. There are twenty letters from Richards to
Wittgenstein deposited in the Austrian National Library, but they will
not be accessible until 2020.
38 ms 131, 14 August 1946.
39 ms 130, 22 July 1946.
40 Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 162; Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 453–4.
41 ms 132, 30 September 1946.
42 N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2001), p. 56.
43 O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher, eds, Ryle (London, 1970), p. 11.
44 Letter to Malcolm, 16 November 1947; Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel.

215
 8 Nothing is Hidden: Philosophical Investigations

1 See I. Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1979), pp. 22ff.

2 See P. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 98–9.
3 Another metaphor he employs is from the business world. He com-
pares the philosopher to ‘a chartered accountant [who] precisely
investigates and clarifies the conduct of a business undertaking’.
Like him the philosopher gives ‘a complete survey of everything that
may produce unclarity’; L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe
and G. H. von Wright, trans. Anscombe (Oxford, 1967), §273.
4 D.A.T. Gasking and A. C. Jackson, ‘Wittgenstein as a Teacher’, in
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann
(New York, 1967), p. 51.
5 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford 1980), p. 15e.
6 L. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–1932 (Oxford,
1980), pp. 21–2.
7 L. Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript: ts 213 (Oxford, 2005), p. 304e.
8 L. Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions (Lanham, md, 2003),
p. 73.
9 There are many commentaries. Among the most reliable are P. Hacker,
Insight and Illusion (Bristol, 1997); A. Kenny, Wittgenstein (Oxford, 2005);
S. Schroeder, Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle (Cambridge,
2006).
10 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 14e.
11 Chapter ii, 2.
12 Chapter iv.
13 ‘Iran’s hard-line president on Saturday inaugurated a heavy-water
production plant, a facility the West fears will be used to develop a
nuclear bomb, as Tehran remained defiant ahead of a un deadline
that could lead to sanctions.’ News headline on Yahoo.com on 26
August 2006, translated into Cockney using The Dialectizer on
www.rinkworks.com/dialect/.
14 Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript, pp. 311e and 317e.

216
 9 The Last Years, 1947–51

1 ms 137, 28 June 1948, 11 July 1948.

2 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 525.
3 Ibid., p. 527.
4 ms 138, 25 February 1949.
5 Letter to Rhees, 31 August 1949. Gower is a peninsula near Swansea.
6 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 553.
7 Ibid., p. 558.
8 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford, 1996), §155.
9 O. K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (Indianapolis,
in, 1986), p. 60.
10 Ibid., p. 12.
11 N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2001), p. 77.
12 Letter to Malcolm, end of November 1949; Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Briefwechsel (Innsbruck, 2004).
13 Letter to Rhees, 7 May 1950; Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel.
14 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), pp. 83e–85e.
15 C. Wilson, The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (London, 1988), p. 225.
16 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 567–8.
17 Ibid., p. 573.
18 Wittgenstein was at times provided with issues of this magazine
by Norman Malcolm, who sent them to Wittgenstein straight from
America. He seems to have been an avid reader of this and other
magazines since at least the early 1930s. Expressing his gratitude
to Malcolm, Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘Your mags are wonderful.
How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith beats
me. If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there’s certainly
not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective
stories’ (letter to Malcolm, 15 March 1948).
19 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §532.

10 The Aftermath

1 P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, and Other Essays (London, 1974),

p. 133.

217
2 A. Kenny, Wittgenstein (Oxford, 2005), p. xii.
3 R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London 1990), p. 486.
4 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980), p. 66e.
5 For two conflicting views on this issue, see G. H. von Wright, The Tree of
Knowledge and Other Essays (Leiden, 1993), and H.-J. Glock, ‘Was
Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?’, Metaphilosophy, xxxv/4 (2004).
6 See R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London 1990),
p. 466.
7 B. McGuinness, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford,
2005), p. 100.
8 R. Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1984), pp. 125–6.
9 P. Hacker, ‘Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
10 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 46e.

218
 Bibliography

Cited writings by Ludwig Wittgenstein

‘Lecture on Ethics’, in Philosophical Occasions

Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford,
1966)
Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Anscombe
(Oxford, 1967)
Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939 (Ithaca, ny, 1976)
Culture and Value (Oxford, 1980)
Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge, 1930–1932 (Oxford, 1980)
Philosophical Occasions (Indianapolis, in, 1993)
On Certainty (Oxford, 1996)
Cambridge Letters (Oxford, 1997)
Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1998) [here abbreviated as ‘pi’]
Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (Bergen and Oxford,
2000) [references to Wittgenstein’s mss follow this edition]
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 2001)
Public and Private Occasions (Lanham, md, 2003)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefwechsel (Innsbruck, 2004)
The Big Typescript: ts 213 (Oxford, 2005)

Secondary literature

‘Architekturzentrum Wien’,
www.nextroom.at/building_article.php?building_id=2338&article_id=2967
(accessed June 2006)
Ambrose, A., Essays in Analysis (London, 1966)

219
––, and M. Lazerowitz, eds, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Language
(London, 1972)
Amis, M., Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (London, 2002)
Anscombe, E., and P. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford, 1967)
Bachtin, N., Lectures and Essays (Birmingham, 1963)
Baker, G., and P. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical
Investigations, 4 vols (Oxford, 1980–96)
Bartley, W. W., Wittgenstein, iii (La Salle, il, 1986)
Berlin, I., Russian Thinkers (London, 1979)
Bouveresse, J., Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious
(Princeton, nj, 1995)
Bouwsma, O. K., Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (Indianapolis, in, 1986)
Brod, M., Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York, 1995)
Cornish, K., The Jew of Linz (London, 1998)
Drury, M., ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal
Recollections, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1981)
Eagleton, T., ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’, New Left Review, i/35 (1982)
––, ‘Introduction to Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script;
The Derek Jarman Film (Worcester, ma, 1993)
Eakin, H., ‘In Vienna, a New View of Wittgenstein Home’, New York Times,
28 August 2003
Engelmann, P., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford, 1967)
Fann, K. T., ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (New York,
1967)
Gasking, D.A.T., and A. C. Jackson, ‘Wittgenstein as a Teacher’, in Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K. T. Fann (New York 1967)
Glock, H.-J., A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford, 1996)
––, ‘Was Wittgenstein an Analytic Philosopher?’, Metaphilosophy, xxxv/4
(2004)
Hacker, P., Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy
(Oxford, 1996)
––, Insight and Illusion (Bristol, 1997)
––, ‘Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
––, ‘Gordon Baker’s Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and
His Interpreters, ed. G. Kahane, E. Kanterian and O. Kuusela
(forthcoming)

220
Hamann, B., Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (Oxford, 1999)
Hargrove, E. C., ‘Wittgenstein, Bartley, and the Glöckel School Reform’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, xviii (1980)
Heidegger, M., Being and Time (Oxford, 1962)
––, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Frankfurt, 1982)
––, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, ct, 2000)
Hertz, H. R., The Principles of Mechanics (London, 1899)
Hintikka, J., On Wittgenstein (Belmont, ca, 2000)
Janik, A., and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973)
Johannessen, K. S., R. Larsen and K. O. Åmås, Wittgenstein and Norway (Oslo,
1994)
Kahane, G., E. Kanterian and O. Kuusela, eds, Wittgenstein and His Interpreters
(forthcoming)
Kenny, A., Wittgenstein (Oxford, 2005)
Klagge, J., ed., Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001)
Leitner, B., The Wittgenstein House (New York, 2000)
Liiceanu, G., The Paltinis Diary (Budapest, 2000)
McGuinness, B., Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers (London, 2002)
––, Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889–1921 (Oxford, 2005)
Malcolm, N., A Religious Point of View? (London, 1993)
––, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2001)
Mehta, V., Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals
(Harmondsworth, 1965)
Midgley, M., The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London, 2005)
Monk, R., Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990)
Nedo, M., and M. Ranchetti, Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten
(Frankfurt, 1983)
Pascal, F., ‘Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal
Recollections, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1981)
Pears, D., The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophy (Oxford, 1987–8)
Perloff, M., Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the
Ordinary (Chicago, il, 1996)
Redpath, T., Wittgenstein: A Student’s Memoir (London, 1990)
Rhees, R., ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford, 1981)
––, Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1984)
Rozema, D., ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A “Poem” by Ludwig

221
 Wittgenstein’, Journal of the History of Ideas, lxiii/2 (2002)
Russell, B., Autobiography (London, 2000)
Sarnitz, A., Adolf Loos (London, 2003)
Schroeder, S., Wittgenstein: The Way out of the Fly-Bottle (Cambridge, 2006)
Stern, D., ‘The Significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’,
Inquiry, xliii (2000)
––, ‘Was Wittgenstein a Jew?’, in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy,
ed. J. Klagge (Cambridge, 2001)
Strawson, P. F., Freedom and Resentment, and Other Essays (London, 1974)
Timms, E., Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg
Vienna (New Haven, ct, and London 1986)
Waismann, F., Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations (Oxford, 1979)
––, The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (Basingstoke, 1997)
Wall, R., Wittgenstein in Ireland (London, 2000)
Wang, W., ‘The Wittgenstein House – Review’, Architectural Review
(September 2001)
Weininger, O., Sex and Character (London, 1906)
Weinzierl, U., ‘Der Fluch des Hauses Wittgenstein’, Die Welt, 5 July 2003
Wijdeveld, P., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (London, 1994)
Wilson, C., The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (London, 1988)
Wittgenstein, H., ‘Recollections’ (1948), unpublished
––, ‘My Brother Ludwig’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections,
ed. R. Rhees (Oxford, 1981)
Wood, O. P., and G. Pitcher, eds, Ryle (London, 1970)
Wright, G. H. von, The Tree of Knowledge and Other Essays (Leiden, 1993)

Websites

www.nextroom.at (Haus Wittgenstein)

www.spiluttini.com (Haus Wittgenstein)
gandalf.aksis.uib.no/wab/ (Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen)
plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus–jsnav.html
(Tractatus online)
www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/wittgens.htm
(Wittgenstein’s lectures on philosophy, 1932–3)

222
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ame Berges, Jakob A. Bertzbach, Anna Dimitrijevics,

Peter Hacker, Steven Hall, Guy Kahane, Michael Stoynov and Ivaylo Vlaev
for suggestions and discussions. Gustav Klimt’s painting of Wittgenstein’s
sister (p. 18) can be found in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich; the photo-
graph on page 188 comes from the Library of Congress, Washington,
dc (Prints and Photographs Division), and the opening page of the
‘Wittgenstein Motet’ is reproduced by kind permission of Schott Music
Limited, London (p. 202; all rights reserved).

223