LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN The Duty of Genius. By Ray Monk. Illustrated. 654 pp. New York: The Free Press. $29.95.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Many books have been written about his philosophy. Ray Monk’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein” is the first substantial biography of his whole life. It is not a book to which one would turn to learn about Wittgenstein’s thought, but enough is said about the philosophical writings to make intelligible the story of the philosopher’s life. And the story is well told; the narrative is vivid, clear, sympathetic and credible.
Wittgenstein’s great-grandfather was a land agent named Moses Maier, who in 1808 took the name of his princely employers, the Wittgensteins. His father, Karl, a friend of Johannes Brahms, was the most acute industrialist in the Austrian steel industry; he made the family the Austrian equivalent of the Carnegies or Rothschilds. He had five sons and three daughters by a Roman Catholic wife, and baptized all of them into the Catholic faith. He set out to educate the sons in a very severe regime which would turn them into captains of industry. He did not succeed. Three of the sons committed suicide; the fourth, Paul, became (despite the loss of an arm in World War I) a concert pianist; the fifth, the youngest child, born in Vienna in 1889, was the philosopher.
Ludwig Wittgenstein attended the Realschule in Linz, where he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. He was a poor scholar, teased by his peers. At school he also lost his faith. The major intellectual influences on him in his youth, apart from the philosophical works of Schopenhauer, were the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (suicide 1906) and the psychologist Otto Weininger (suicide 1903).
Mr. Monk believes that Weininger’s bizarre book “Sex and Character” was of fundamental importance in shaping Wittgenstein’s career. According to Weininger — a homosexual — all human beings are bisexual, a mixture of male and female. Woman is nothing but sexuality: every woman is a mixture of prostitute and mother. Men must choose between the masculine and feminine elements within themselves; the ideal for a man is to free himself from sex. “The choice that Weininger’s theory offers is a bleak and terrible one indeed: genius or death,” says Mr. Monk. “If . . . one cannot free oneself from sensuality and earthly desires — then one has no right to live at all.”
For Wittgenstein, to acquire genius became a categorical imperative. He once described Beethoven greeting a friend on completion of a new fugue: he “came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage. That’s the sort of man to be.”
It was in Cambridge in 1911 that Wittgenstein first gave evidence of genius in philosophy, and it was Bertrand Russell who first recognized it. Wittgenstein was, Russell wrote, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Russell was already well known as the author of powerful, original work in logic and mathematics; he soon realized that Wittgenstein’s gifts were greater than his own, and he devoted himself with great generosity to their development. In 1912 he told Wittgenstein’s sister, “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”
The expectation was fulfilled, but Wittgenstein’s philosophical message was not given to the world until after World War I. During that war he served in the Austrian Army on the Eastern and Italian fronts, and much of the material that later appeared in his masterpiece, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” was written while on active service. At the front Wittgenstein showed conspicuous courage and was commended and decorated; he was also converted, by the reading of Tolstoy, to an intense though idiosyncratic Christianity. “Perhaps the nearness of death,” he wrote in his diary, “will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen.”
After the war, having inherited a share of his father’s fortune, he found himself one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Within a month of returning from the army he gave all his money away. For some years he supported himself as a gardener or as a schoolmaster in rural Austrian schools. He believed, for a while, that he had already solved all the problems of philosophy in his “Tractatus,” which appeared (after great difficulty in finding a publisher) in German in 1921 and in English in 1922. The book quickly became famous; though it was itself metaphysical and almost mystical, as well as austerely logical, it was most admired by the anti-metaphysical positivists of the Vienna Circle.
It was at Vienna that Wittgenstein returned to the study of philosophy, when his career as a schoolmaster came to an unhappy end after allegations of cruelty to his pupils. Eventually he returned to Cambridge and during his years there in the 1930’s he became the most influential teacher of philosophy in Britain. The philosophy he taught in this period differed from that published in the “Tractatus”; it was not presented in print until “Philosophical Investigations” was published posthumously in 1953.
After the Anschluss, Hitler’s forced unification of Austria and Germany in 1938, Wittgenstein became a British citizen. During World War II he worked as a paramedic, and in 1947 he resigned his Cambridge chair. He continued to write philosophy and to communicate philosophical thoughts to close friends and disciples. After a period of solitary life in Ireland, he stayed in the houses of various friends in Oxford and Cambridge until his death in 1951 at the age of 62. He left a mass of philosophical papers, many of them still awaiting publication.
Wittgenstein’s genius is patent to any philosopher who will take the time and trouble to come to grips with his profound but difficult writings. His life, as described by Mr. Monk, seems to have been a lonely and tragic one. He was often tormented by temptations to suicide, and was sometimes on the verge of mental illness. He regarded his life as a professor as “a living death,” and held many of his colleagues, in the various callings he pursued, in loathing and contempt. His only philosophical peer was Russell, and the relationship between the two soured after Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge. Many of his philosophical disciples loved him, but it was a love mixed strongly with fear.
Four times in his life, according to Mr. Monk, Wittgenstein fell deeply in love. Three of his loves were male and one female. (Sensational stories have been told of Wittgenstein’s passion for rough homosexuals picked up in Vienna parks; Mr. Monk examines the evidence patiently and convincingly and concludes that any such encounters took place only in Wittgenstein’s own fantasy.) David Pinsent, to whose memory the “Tractatus” was dedicated, accompanied Wittgenstein to Norway and Iceland in the prewar period; he was killed in 1918. Francis Skinner, who came up to Cambridge as a student in 1930, had an all-absorbing relationship with Wittgenstein in the 30’s; and in 1946 Wittgenstein fell in love with a Cambridge medical student, Ben Richards, 40 years his junior.
MANY readers will be surprised to learn from Mr. Monk’s book that there was a time when Wittgenstein had plans to marry. From 1926 to 1931 he had a friendship with a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger. For a period he wrote to her almost daily, and he sculpted a bust of her. An entry in his diary for 1930 reads: “Arrived back in Cambridge after the Easter vacation. In Vienna often with Marguerite. Easter Sunday with her in Neuwaldegg. For three hours we kissed each other a great deal and it was very nice.”
Once it became clear that Wittgenstein wanted to marry her, Marguerite drew back — especially as it transpired that what the philosopher had in mind was a Platonic, childless union.
Faith in God was important to Wittgenstein; but his faith seems to have been a somber one. God was perhaps no more than Fate. If He was to be thought of as a person, it was solely as a severe judge. Yet Wittgenstein’s last words were, “Tell [ my friends ] I’ve had a wonderful life.” Ray Monk’s book has succeeded remarkably in portraying some of its wonders.
HE WELCOMED THE BOMB
Wittgenstein’s hostility towards professional philosophy and his dislike of Cambridge remained constant throughout his academic career, but in the years . . . that followed the Second World War, they seemed to become fused with a kind of apocalyptic vision. . . .
What links this apocalyptic anxiety with his hostility to academic philosophy is his detestation of the power of science in our age, which on the one hand encouraged the philosopher’s “craving for generality,” and on the other produced the atomic bomb. . . . He even welcomed the bomb, if only the fear of it could do something to diminish the reverence with which society regarded scientific progress. . . . The most pessimistic view, for him, was one which foresaw the triumph of science and technology: “Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is . . . nothing but a dream; perhaps science and industry, having caused infinite misery in the process, will unite the world — I mean condense it into a single unit, though one in which peace is the last thing that will find a home. Because science and industry do decide wars, or so it seems.”
How my heart sings 