The life of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. In those 62 years he gave away one of the largest fortunes in Europe, wrote two books that pushed philosophy in opposite directions, taught children in mountain villages, designed a house, carried medicines through a London hospital and spent long months alone in Norway and on the west coast of Ireland. His life is often told as a legend. The facts are strange enough without decoration.

Vienna childhood and the family

Ludwig was the youngest of eight children. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, had built a steel empire and was one of the richest men in the Habsburg monarchy. His mother, Leopoldine Kalmus, was a fine pianist. The family lived in the Palais Wittgenstein in the Alleegasse, where Johannes Brahms was a guest and music was taken almost as seriously as money.

The children were taught at home, and the pressure on the sons was enormous. Three of the five brothers took their own lives. Hans, the musical prodigy, disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay in 1902. Rudolf poisoned himself in a Berlin bar in 1904. Kurt shot himself in the last days of the First World War. Paul became a concert pianist, lost his right arm in the first months of that war and rebuilt his career with pieces he commissioned for the left hand, among them Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand.

Ludwig, the practical child who loved machines, was sent at fourteen to a Realschule in Linz (1903-1906), the school the young Adolf Hitler also attended until 1904, so that the two overlapped in the school year 1903-1904, though there is no reliable evidence that the two boys knew each other.

Engineering in Berlin and Manchester

From 1906 he studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 1908 he moved to Manchester as a research student in aeronautics. After experiments with kites near Glossop he designed a propeller driven by small jets at the tips of its blades, patented in 1911.

The engineering led him to mathematics, and the mathematics to its foundations. He read Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics and the work of Gottlob Frege. In the summer of 1911 he visited Frege in Jena, and Frege advised him to go to Cambridge and study with Russell.

Cambridge and Russell, 1911-1913

In October 1911 he turned up unannounced in Russell's rooms at Trinity College. Russell later told how this intense young Austrian asked him whether he was a complete idiot: if so, he would become an aeronaut, if not, a philosopher. Russell asked for a piece of writing, read the first sentence and told him not to become an aeronaut.

Within a year the student had become a colleague. Russell wrote that he expected Wittgenstein to take the next big step in philosophy, and under his criticism he largely set aside his own work on logic. Wittgenstein argued with G.E. Moore and John Maynard Keynes and became close friends with the young mathematician David Pinsent. In January 1913 his father died.

Norway

In October 1913 he withdrew to Skjolden, a village at the end of the Sognefjord, to work on logic without distraction. When Moore visited in the spring of 1914, Wittgenstein dictated notes to him. He had a small wooden house built on a slope above a lake near the village, a place he would return to many times. With his inheritance he also made an anonymous gift of 100,000 crowns through Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the review Der Brenner, to be shared among Austrian writers and artists in need, Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl among them.

War and the Tractatus

When war broke out in August 1914 he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, although a hernia would have exempted him. He served on a patrol boat on the Vistula, and in a bookshop in Galicia he bought Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, which he carried everywhere. In 1916 he asked for the most exposed posts on the Russian front and was decorated for bravery. During officer training in Olmütz he befriended the architect Paul Engelmann.

David Pinsent was killed in a flying accident in May 1918. That summer, on leave, Wittgenstein finished the book he would dedicate to him. In November 1918 he was captured by the Italian army and spent nine months in prisoner-of-war camps, the last near Monte Cassino. From there he sent the manuscript to Russell. After several refusals it appeared in German in 1921 and as a bilingual edition, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in London in 1922. It ends with a single sentence.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

What one cannot speak about, one has to be silent about.

Tractatus 7

Giving away the fortune

Back in Vienna in August 1919, he did something his family found hard to understand. Within weeks he signed over his entire share of the family fortune to his siblings Hermine, Helene and Paul, and insisted that the transfer be legally final so that nothing could ever come back to him. From then on he lived on very little.

Schoolteacher in Lower Austria, 1920-1926

After a year at a teacher training college in Vienna, he taught at primary schools in the villages of Lower Austria: Trattenbach (1920-1922), very briefly Hassbach, then Puchberg am Schneeberg (1922-1924), where the young Frank Ramsey visited him to go through the Tractatus line by line, and finally Otterthal (1924-1926). He was an inventive and demanding teacher. He took his pupils to Vienna, built models with them, taught them algebra far beyond the curriculum and compiled a spelling dictionary for primary schools, published in 1926.

He was also quick-tempered, and he hit children. In April 1926 he struck eleven-year-old Josef Haidbauer on the head and the boy collapsed. Wittgenstein carried him to the head teacher's office and left the village. He resigned on 28 April 1926. Legal proceedings followed, and their outcome is not fully documented. The episode stayed with him: in 1937 he went back to the villages to apologise in person to children he had hurt.

The house in Vienna

His sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein had commissioned a town house in the Kundmanngasse from Paul Engelmann. From 1926 Wittgenstein joined the project and gradually took it over, down to the door handles, the radiators and the exact height of the rooms. The house was finished at the end of 1928. His sister Hermine called it logic turned into a house (hausgewordene Logik). It still stands, and since 1975 it has housed the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy. The Architekturzentrum Wien has documented its history.

In the same years Moritz Schlick drew him into talks with members of the Vienna Circle, to whom he sometimes read poems by Rabindranath Tagore instead of discussing logic.

Return to Cambridge, 1929

In January 1929 he returned to Cambridge. Keynes wrote to his wife: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." Since he had no degree, he submitted the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis. Russell and Moore examined him in June 1929. At the end Wittgenstein clapped them on the shoulder and told them not to worry, he knew they would never understand it. Moore wrote in his report that he considered the thesis a work of genius.

In 1930 Trinity elected him to a research fellowship. He lectured without notes in his own sparsely furnished rooms, thinking aloud in front of students in deckchairs. His thinking changed deeply. He dictated the Blue Book (1933-1934) and the Brown Book (1934-1935), visited the Soviet Union in 1935 with the idea of settling there, and in 1936, in his house in Norway, began the work that became the Philosophical Investigations.

Professor at Cambridge, 1939

After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, Wittgenstein became a German citizen overnight, and under the Nuremberg laws his family counted as Jewish. He applied for British nationality and helped negotiate protection for his sisters in Vienna. In February 1939 he was elected to succeed Moore as professor of philosophy, as the Trinity College archives record, and that spring he became a British citizen.

War work at Guy's Hospital and Newcastle

He found it unbearable to teach philosophy while others were fighting. In 1941 he took a job as a porter at Guy's Hospital in London, carrying medicines from the dispensary to the wards. In 1943 he followed a medical research team studying wound shock to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle and worked there as a laboratory assistant. In 1944 he went back to teaching in Cambridge.

Ireland

He disliked academic life more and more, and in 1947 he resigned his chair. He went to Ireland: first to a farmhouse in County Wicklow, then to a cottage at Rosro on Killary Harbour in Connemara, where he tamed the birds that came to his window, and finally to Ross's Hotel in Dublin, close to his friend Maurice Drury. There he wrote much of the material on the philosophy of psychology that was published after his death.

Last years and death

In 1949 he visited his former student Norman Malcolm in Ithaca, New York. Back in England, late that year, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He spent his last months with family and friends: in Vienna beside his dying sister Hermine, in Oxford with Elizabeth Anscombe, in Cambridge with Georg Henrik von Wright. In February 1951 he moved into the house of his doctor, Edward Bevan, and kept writing the remarks later published as On Certainty until two days before he died. On the evening of 28 April, already very ill, he said to Joan Bevan:

Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958)

He died on 29 April 1951 and was buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge. The Philosophical Investigations appeared two years later, in 1953. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Ray Monk's article in Britannica give sober accounts. Monk's biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), remains the standard full-length life.