TWO days before his death, aged 62, on 29 April, 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein sent a farewell message to close friends in England: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” In some ways, he had, despite the sporadic sadness that burdened his days.
Born in Vienna in 1889 to an Austrian family of Jewish descent which was wealthy and cultured, Wittgenstein — the youngest of eight children — grew up in a household in which patronage of the arts was a joy and a duty. Music was revered, especially the works of Mozart and Beethoven.
Although he had perfect pitch, Wittgenstein’s early path in life seemed to point in a different direction. In 1908, after studies in Berlin, he moved to the University of Manchester to pursue research in aeronautical engineering. After reading Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, however, he became obsessed with philosophical questions. In 1912, he registered as a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and fairly quickly secured an interview with Russell himself. After reading just one sentence of a paper prepared by Wittgenstein, Russell recognised his brilliance and instructed him “. . . you must not become an aeronaut.”
After five terms in Cambridge, Wittgenstein went to Norway, where he lived in isolation and began to formulate the philosophy that would bring him fame. After war broke out, he served as a volunteer in the Austrian forces. Decorated for bravery, and often in positions where he was exposed to enemy fire, he carried with him Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. Taken prisoner by the Italian army in 1918, he later noted that Tolstoy’s attenuated text had “virtually kept me alive during the war”.
In the face of suffering and death, he managed to record his philosophical thoughts in notebooks carried in a rucksack. In 1950, many of these were destroyed on his orders, but not before Wittgenstein had drawn on them for the one book (apart from a dictionary for children) published in his lifetime: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an unsettling and difficult text of barely 20,000 words comprising a series of sparse, numbered paragraphs, often little more than a single sentence. The two most famous are the first: “The world is all that is the case”; and the last: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
First published in English in 1922, it remains one of the most influential philosophical texts of the 20th century, generating fierce debate concerning its ideas and implications for the world of philosophy and, more widely, the fields of ethics, theology, and the meaning of religious language.
The book has spawned thousands of commentaries and articles on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, undoubtedly aided by the fascination that his life holds for a wider readership untutored in the world of ideas, but intrigued, and, in some instances, inspired, by his life, his strangeness, and his character.
Behind the book lies a conflicted individual who, before the war, had given away his vast inheritance to various writers and artists (including Rilke and Oskar Kokoschka), and later to his siblings. This was no grand philanthropic gesture, but simply a recognition on his part that acquisitiveness in all its forms represented a distraction from the more pressing question how he ought to live. From that point onwards, he chose frugality, working for a time as a teacher and a gardener; he also designed a townhouse in Vienna for one of his sisters, which he treated as a philosophical exercise.
In 1929, he returned to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer, and was subsequently elected to a chair in philosophy. During the Second World War, he struggled with the idea that others were fighting while he was teaching philosophy, and so he turned to manual work, portering at Guy’s Hospital, in London, where staff were not informed that the new recruit was “one of the world’s most famous philosophers”.
IN HIS position as a professor at Cambridge, Wittgenstein was both baffling and compelling. Even famous and clever contemporaries such as John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey initially struggled to understand him. A former student, recalling his time at the university in 1939, remembered a small and slender teacher whose eyes were deep and often fierce in their expression, and an urgent voice reflecting “anger, impatience, and sometimes dismay at his own perceived ineptitude as a teacher of philosophy”.
Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, was a serious endeavour embracing life and death, strenuous ethical standards, and the pursuit of truth. After lectures, he would try to relax at the local cinema, watching his favourite Hollywood Westerns as he ate a pork pie. American detective stories also provided a welcome diversion for him, preferably read in solitude.
Eccentricity was only one aspect of Wittgenstein’s complex disposition. He was self-absorbed and kind; demanding in personal relations, yet often detached; proud but self-effacing; ready to be with “ordinary people” while desperate for solitude; and troubled by his sexuality and the intimate liaisons that brought him no lasting happiness.
Bouts of depression enfeebled him and gave rise to thoughts of self-harm. The knowledge that three of his brothers had taken their own lives rarely left him. Conscious of his failings, he judged himself harshly, and longed for the purity of heart enjoined by saints and mystics.
Although apparently indifferent to organised religion, and generally unobservant of the dogmas and rituals of the Roman Catholicism in which he had been raised, attending mass only rarely, Wittgenstein had a profoundly religious outlook. He prayed privately and asked others to pray for him.
IN THE preface to the Tractatus, he made clear that, far from being an attack on religious discourse, as some readers thought, the book had an ethical concern with the proper limits of language. Its aim was, in part, to preserve the purity and coherence of language by exposing the confused thought that stemmed from its misuse: “What can be said at all can be said clearly.”
Wittgenstein commended a discipline of silence to safeguard language (religious or otherwise) from the consequences of trying to articulate what can only be demonstrated. This difficult precept amounted to what he later described in the book as “the simple demand that we should at all times and in all places say no more than we really know”.
Religion embedded in ethical action required no further justification, or baseless propositions: it is life itself “and sufferings of various sorts that can educate one to a belief in God”.
IN HIS last months, already gravely ill, Wittgenstein requested a meeting with a “non-philosophical” priest whose religion had made a practical difference. Fr Conrad, a Dominican priest, came forth. He would return again in Wittgenstein’s final moments, to recite the Office for the Dying as his Roman Catholic friends knelt and prayed in his room.
Later, they arranged a Catholic funeral. Commenting on this last ritual, Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, observed that this religious ceremony was fitting and appropriate for their friend, who, in a way that was of central importance but difficult to define, “had lived a devoutly religious life”.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.
