LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, by Anthony Gottlieb
“The autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought.” So wrote the British philosopher Robin Collingwood in the preface to his famously impersonal memoir. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a difficult case for a biographer who takes Collingwood’s maxim to heart.
The short “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” of 1921, which combines the dauntingly technical with the obscurely mystical, was very nearly the only thing Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. Much else of what is known of him — his wealthy family, his complex sexuality, his intense personality — has the flavor of legend, conveyed in thousands of anecdotes that proliferated after his death in 1951.
Yet the paper trail has never run out. What was once a trickle of manuscripts and letters is now a torrent. Four substantial biographies already exist, along with a small library’s worth of commentaries. Is there room for another?
Anthony Gottlieb’s slim new life does not try to replicate what already exists. Readers seeking a philosophical introduction are already spoiled for choice. Instead, Gottlieb, a former executive editor of The Economist and the author of two previous books on philosophy, aims for a human biography where the ideas are kept firmly in their place. He briskly evokes the artistic world of fin de siècle Vienna in which Wittgenstein grew up, surrounded by luxury and high culture. Without indulging prurient interest, he brings out the troubled spirit Wittgenstein shared with his four brothers, three of whom took their own lives.
Gottlieb sketches the philosopher’s intellectual development in broad strokes. Wittgenstein’s early interests in engineering turned quickly into fascination with the foundations of mathematics. He somehow persuaded the world’s leading authority on the subject, Bertrand Russell, to take him seriously. Russell eased the young Austrian’s path into Cambridge University, supporting him despite realizing that Wittgenstein would never remain a protégé, still less an intellectual heir.
Restless and protean, he repudiated not only his mentor but some central claims in his own initial work, living out his vision of philosophy as an activity rather than a doctrine. That vision culminated in a book that was only published posthumously, as the “Philosophical Investigations,” in 1953. His early work was about the distinction between sense and nonsense, between what could be said and what lay beyond the limits of language. His later work was less concerned with the ineffable, and more concerned with language as a human practice, and with words in the context of their everyday (rather than philosophical) uses.
Gottlieb’s book is part of Yale’s series on “Jewish Lives.” But does Wittgenstein, born into a family so thoroughly assimilated that “their real religion,” Gottlieb writes, was “German music,” belong alongside Maimonides, Golda Meir and Mel Brooks?
The question turns on a confession. In 1936, Wittgenstein wrote to a friend admitting an old lie: He had claimed to be “descended one-quarter from Jews and three-quarters from Aryans, even though it is just the other way round. This cowardly lie has burdened me for a long time.” There would be something comic about the earnestness of this revelation, except that, as Gottlieb notes, it came a year after the Nuremberg racial laws determined that anyone “at least three-quarters descended from Jews counted as a Jew.” (In 1939, Wittgenstein obtained British citizenship and his family in Vienna used their wealth “to buy ‘half-breed’ status,” thus exempting them from the Nuremberg laws.)
Wittgenstein was much given to such self-recrimination. When it wasn’t about his Jewishness, it was about his brutal treatment of schoolchildren he had once, improbably, taught in rural Austria. Or about, as a soldier during World War I, having once been afraid of carrying out an order. Or even, as his diaries reveal, about his occasionally having masturbated.
One weary friend, Gottlieb reports, cried out in frustration: “What is it? You want to be perfect?” Wittgenstein is supposed to have replied: “Of course I want to be perfect.” The “of course” is most revealing, as if he wanted to say: Obviously; doesn’t everybody? Wittgenstein could not conceive of someone entirely at peace with his own faults.
Readers seeking a fuller picture of the thought and its context must turn to Ray Monk’s 1990 biography, which still has the best balance of context, exposition and anecdote. But Gottlieb’s more selective treatment, precisely because it doesn’t try to say everything, illuminates everything it touches: Wittgenstein’s restiveness, his ambivalent Jewishness and how much, despite his years in Britain, he remained a creature of Vienna.
Gottlieb does not accept Wittgenstein at his own estimation. Whatever the man may have grandly declared, his work “was not an end to traditional philosophizing but a highly personal continuation of it.” In showing us a philosopher shaped as much by the musical salons of the “Palais Wittgenstein” — the local name for the family’s sumptuous townhouse — as by Cambridge logic, Gottlieb makes a quiet case for including this most reluctant of Jewish lives, a man who could never quite escape the Vienna he left, nor the heritage he spent his life both denying and confessing.
Like its subject’s later philosophy, this book finds clarity not through ambitious systematic claims but through careful attention to particulars — and in those particulars, we glimpse not just a more Jewish Wittgenstein, but a more human one.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes | By Anthony Gottlieb | Yale | 209 pp. | $28
The post Wittgenstein’s Philosophy Is Daunting. This Biography Makes Him Human. appeared first on New York Times.
