A palace in Vienna
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889, at the family’s villa in Neuwaldegg on the edge of Vienna, the youngest of nine children of Karl Wittgenstein and Leopoldine “Poldi” Kalmus. Karl was a steel magnate who had built an effective monopoly over the Austrian steel cartel, and by the 1890s the Wittgensteins were among the richest families in Europe, second in the Habsburg Empire only to the Rothschilds. Karl was a great patron of the arts, helping to fund Vienna’s Secession Building; Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister Margaret, and the family palace held seven grand pianos. Johannes Brahms knew the family well.
The household was also a place of terrible strain. Karl, a harsh perfectionist, had his sons educated at home to prepare them to run his industrial empire. Three of Ludwig’s four brothers took their own lives: Hans disappeared in 1902, presumed a suicide; Rudi killed himself in a Berlin bar in 1904; and Kurt killed himself at the end of the First World War. Another brother, Paul, lost an arm in that war and went on to a celebrated career as a one-handed concert pianist.
A Jewish family that had become Christian
By descent Wittgenstein was three-quarters Jewish. His paternal great-great-grandfather, Moses Meier, was a Jewish land agent in Westphalia whose son took the surname Wittgenstein from the princely family he served. Ludwig’s paternal grandfather, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, adopted the middle name “Christian” to distance himself from his Jewish background and married Fanny Figdor, also born Jewish, who converted to Protestantism before their wedding. His mother’s father was a Bohemian Jew; only his maternal grandmother, an Austrian Catholic, was not of Jewish birth.
The children were baptised and raised Catholic, and for most of his life Wittgenstein did not describe himself as a Jew. Yet the question never left him. In notebooks around 1930 he referred to himself as Jewish, often in harsh, self-deprecating terms, and in 1949 he told his friend Maurice Drury that his thoughts were “one hundred percent Hebraic.” After 1938 the Nazis would decide the question for him.
From aeronautics to logic
Wittgenstein was sent to a technical school in Linz, where Adolf Hitler, born the same week of 1889, was a pupil at the same time, though the two were in different years. He went on to study mechanical engineering in Berlin and in 1908 moved to the University of Manchester to pursue aeronautical research, experimenting with kites and dreaming of designing and flying his own plane. Reading Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and Gottlob Frege’s work on the foundations of arithmetic, he became obsessed with the philosophy of logic. Frege advised him to study with Russell, and on October 18, 1911, he turned up unannounced at Russell’s rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Russell soon decided that the intense young Austrian was a genius. Within two years the pupil was criticising the master’s work so devastatingly that Russell confessed he felt ready for suicide. When his father died in 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a fortune and gave large sums, distributed through the editor Ludwig von Ficker, to artists in need, among them the poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke and the architect Adolf Loos.
At Cambridge he formed an intense friendship with David Pinsent, a mathematics undergraduate, and in 1913 the two travelled to Norway, where Wittgenstein worked furiously on logic. Wittgenstein later went back alone and spent months in isolation in Norway to work on logic. Pinsent was killed in a plane crash in May 1918, a loss that devastated Wittgenstein.
The soldier and the Tractatus
When war broke out in 1914, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army even though he could have claimed a medical exemption. He served on the Russian and Italian fronts, often as an artillery observer in exposed positions, and was repeatedly decorated for bravery. Through it all he filled notebooks with philosophy and with religious reflections; he carried Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief everywhere and was known to fellow soldiers as “the man with the gospels.”
In the summer of 1918, on leave in Vienna, he finished the book that became the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Weeks later he was captured on the Italian front and spent nine months in a prisoner-of-war camp, Published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922, it argued that language pictures the world: meaningful propositions share a logical form with the facts they depict, and philosophical problems arise from misunderstanding the logic of our language. Much that matters most, including ethics, aesthetics and the mystical, cannot be said but only shown. The book ends with the line that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Schoolteacher, gardener, architect
Believing he had solved the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left the subject. In 1919 he gave away his entire fortune to his siblings and trained as a primary school teacher. From 1920 he taught in poor villages in Lower Austria, among them Trattenbach and Otterthal, where he wrote a spelling dictionary for his pupils. He was an exacting and often harsh teacher; in April 1926, after he struck an eleven-year-old pupil, Josef Haidbauer, on the head until the boy collapsed, he left the school and gave up teaching.
He worked for a time as a monastery gardener and then spent two years designing and building a stark, meticulously proportioned house in Vienna for his sister Margaret. Meanwhile the Tractatus had become famous; the philosophers of the Vienna Circle studied it line by line, and Moritz Schlick persuaded Wittgenstein to meet with members of the group.
Cambridge and a new philosophy
In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, received a doctorate with the Tractatus as his thesis, and began teaching. Over the next two decades he developed a radically different philosophy, largely through intense lectures and discussions in which he thought aloud before his students. He came to reject the idea that language has a single hidden logical structure. Instead, he argued, the meaning of a word is its use in the language; language consists of many “language games” woven into human activities and forms of life; concepts are linked by overlapping “family resemblances” rather than a single essence; and a purely private language, intelligible only to one person, is impossible.
Philosophy, on this view, does not build theories but dissolves confusions by showing how words actually work. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore as professor of philosophy at Cambridge, and that April became a British subject. Russell, who admired the early work, could see little value in the later; many others came to regard the later work as the greater achievement.
His presence was overwhelming. Russell called him “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” At a 1946 meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, a confrontation with the visiting Viennese philosopher Karl Popper became one of the most famous arguments in the history of philosophy, remembered for the hot poker that, by most accounts, Wittgenstein waved while demanding an example of a moral rule; accounts of what exactly happened still differ. Later thinkers from Saul Kripke onward built entire research programmes on his remarks about rule-following.
The Nazi years
In March 1938, while Wittgenstein was in Ireland, Germany annexed Austria. Under the Nuremberg Laws he and his siblings, with three Jewish grandparents, were now classified as Jews. He had earlier told friends in England that he had only one Jewish grandparent and now confessed that he had three. His sisters remained in Vienna in grave danger. In 1939 the family negotiated with the Nazi authorities: in exchange for handing over a huge portion of the family’s foreign assets, including some 1,700 kilograms of gold held in Switzerland, Hitler personally granted the siblings the status of Mischlinge, people of mixed descent, sparing them from deportation. Wittgenstein travelled to Berlin and New York to help secure the deal; his brother Paul’s opposition to it caused a permanent rift in the family.
During the Second World War, finding it intolerable to teach philosophy while others fought, Wittgenstein worked as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London and then as a laboratory assistant in a medical research unit in Newcastle.
“A wonderful life”
Wittgenstein resigned his professorship in 1947 to write, living for a time in rural Ireland, including a cottage on the coast of Connemara. In 1949 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He spent his final months in Cambridge at the home of his doctor, Edward Bevan, and his wife, Joan, working almost to the end on the notes later published as On Certainty. He died on April 29, 1951, aged sixty-two. According to his friend Norman Malcolm, his last words to Joan Bevan were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Catholic friends prayed at his bedside with a Dominican friar present, and he was buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.
He published only one philosophical book in his lifetime. Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953, edited from his manuscripts by his students, and was followed by many further volumes. Together with the Tractatus it made him, in the view of many, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, reshaping logic, the philosophy of mind and language, and fields from linguistics to cognitive science, and leaving a model of a thinker who demanded absolute honesty of himself and his readers.
Sources & further reading
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wikipedia · Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Ludwig Wittgenstein, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.