Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
by Ray Monk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ray MonkEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-11-01
ISBN: 0140159959
Number of pages: 672
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
Book Review: Fascinating Account of Wittgenstein's Life
Summary: 5 Stars
A 20th century original, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent much of his adult life as a Cambridge don in England while apparently hating it! A troubled, if brilliant, man he first became fascinated by the technical philosophical work of Bertrand Russell in his youth while studying to be an engineer in England. After an initially awkward first interview with Russell, the dean of logical analysis became convinced that "his German" (he was in fact Austrian, as Russell subsequently determined) had the stuff of genius and might well be the answer to his needs. Russell had become convinced that he'd made all the progress he would ever make on the technical side of philosophy and had so exhausted himself that he needed to find and nurture a younger acolyte with the energy to carry on and take "the next big step."
Russell soon concluded Wittgenstein was his man and became the young Austrian's mentor. Wittgenstein plunged into the work with his usual focus, though he could not bring himself to publish until he had it right, much to Russell's dismay. World War I found Wittgenstein back in his family home in Vienna (where his kin, members of an extremely wealthy industrialist family of German-Jewish descent, though Catholic in upbringing and commitment, were prominent). Volunteering for service in the Austrian army, Wittgenstein found life as a soldier, among average people, intolerable and volunteered for the front to test his mettle. There, he placed himself in harm's way, impressing his superiors and ended up a prisoner of the Italians.
During this time he committed his thoughts to a small book which he shared by mail with Russell: the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, destined to become a classic though he had a great deal of trouble getting it published initially. After the war and publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein left philosophy for a career as a grammar school teacher in a rural part of post-World War I Austria. He seems to have been a good teacher, if overly demanding and given to corporal punishment of his charges, something he came to regret in later life. After one particularly eggregious incident, he fled Austria's school system and returned to Cambridge to do philosophy again.
During his period as a grade school teacher, his Tractatus made the rounds of professional philosophers in Cambridge and in Austria (where it fascinated the nascent movement of logical positivists, who sought to establish a philosophical method entirely consistent with science and free of the taint of old philosophy's metaphysics). Though Wittgenstein became something of a guiding light for these "Vienna Circle" positivists, his concerns were never quite consonant with theirs.
Back in Cambridge, he took up his teaching duties again, as assistant instructor and, later, professor of philosophy, but could never bring himself to publish another work, though he worked on many manuscripts and much of what he thought and wrote was circulated in notebook, and other more or less unpublished, forms. During this time he began to question what he had done in the Tractatus, a book he had once thought answered all the questions that could be answered. As he wrestled with his old ideas he gradually came to discard them, much to the chagrin of Russell who could not fathom the odd turn Wittgenstein's thought had taken which seemed to deny everything Russell found important and worth troubling over. The two men grew apart. While admiring Wittgenstein's ability to think deeply and with originality, Russell came to conclude that Wittgenstein's philosophy had gone wrong. More telling, though, is that Russell's own way of doing philosophy, so-called logicism, gradually fell out of favour as young philosophers came under the Wittgensteinian spell.
A charismatic if irascible man, the expatriate don continued, after his return to Cambridge, to work through his revolutionary ideas about the nature of logic and knowing itself, and what it really meant to do philosophy. Discarding the old logicist notions he'd held in the Tractatus, he revised his way of understanding the world. If, in the Tractatus, he'd supposed that language somehow mirrored the world and that this could be seen but not explicitly discussed, he now came to hold that language did not so much reflect what was in the world as construct it. His new view suggested that language was more like a tool box than a camera or mirror and that we built our world by applying its tools in their proper places.
The way to understand things was to look deeply into the uses of language itself which, in their ordinary form, were more basic and substantial than the logical forms which had been the stuff of Russellian analysis. For the later Wittgenstein, the key was to stop thinking about abstractions and to return, instead, to the concrete. Philosophical problems were largely puzzles or confusions which needed not to be solved, as with scientific problems, but, rather, dissolved. Philosophy became, on his view, a personal search for understanding and not a process of building systems to compete with scientific theorizing. His focus and interests ranged from the foundations of mathematics (he denied the logicist basis Russell had aimed to construct) to the arts and ethical matters (how must a man live?) though he doesn't seem to have contributed anything explicit in this last area.
Philosophy became, in his view, the search for insight, for new ways of seeing, and the abandonment of system-building and hollow logical discourse which he thought too divorced from what we really thought and said, as manifested in our daily language and activities. Out of this later Wittgensteinian view arose the linguistic analysis school of philosophy and the ordinary language school, two approaches that saw the way to do philosophy as the unpacking of misused verbiage which occurs when we are led astray by superficial appearances in language. The key was to look at language as it is actually used and realize that what is meant is often quite different from what we take a word, phrase, or claim to mean.
A man of religious fervour and orientation, Wittgenstein never seemed able to accept the Catholic doctrines of his youth though he was drawn inexorably towards them. His apparently homosexual orientation complicated matters and prompted a sense of self-loathing that seems to have haunted him to his final days. In this fine biography, the man's course is carefully traced from childhood to his deathbed, writing philosophy to the last, despite his famous advice to his students to avoid the field and his belief that the best way to do philosophy was to achieve the state of understanding which enabled you to simply stop worrying about so-called philosophical problems and just walk away.
SWM
Summary of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
"Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk's life of Wittgenstein is such a one."?The Christian Science Monitor.
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