Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austro-British philosopher, published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime, and it ran to just 75 pages. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of April 1889 and died on the 29th of April 1951. Nearly everything else he wrote stayed in manuscript, and editors published it after his death. Even so, a 1999 survey of American university and college teachers ranked one of those posthumous books, Philosophical Investigations, as the most important work of philosophy in the twentieth century.

  That raises some odd questions. How does a thinker with so little in print become so central to his field? What made the heir to an enormous fortune walk away from comfort and from academic posts, again and again? And what did a man who worked on logic, mathematics, the mind and language believe philosophy was actually for?

  The answers begin in Vienna, in a household that treated music as a serious business.

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• 2. A House of Pianos

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  In July 1808, Napoleon decreed that every family, Jewish families included, must adopt an inheritable surname. A land agent's son from Westphalia, also named Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins. His own son, Hermann Christian, added the middle name Christian to distance himself from his Jewish background. Hermann married Fanny Figdor, who converted to Protestantism just before the wedding. Together they founded a successful wool trading business in Leipzig.

  Hermann and Fanny had 11 children, and one of them, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein, became the philosopher's father. Karl, who lived from 1847 to 1913, held an effective monopoly over Austria's steel cartel. By the late 1880s he ranked among the richest men in Europe. The family became the second wealthiest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with only the Rothschilds ahead. Karl was seen as the Austrian equivalent of Andrew Carnegie, and the two were friends.

  In 1898 Karl chose to invest heavily in the Netherlands, in Switzerland and overseas, especially in the United States. That decision shielded the family, to an extent, from the hyperinflation that hit Austria in 1922. Their wealth still shrank after 1918 and again during the Great Depression. Yet in 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.

  Ludwig was the youngest of nine children, born at 8:30 in the morning in the Villa Wittgenstein, in the suburb of Neuwaldegg. His sisters were Hermine, Margaret, known as Gretl, Helene, and Dora, who died as a baby. His brothers were Johannes, called Hans, Kurt, Rudolf, called Rudi, and Paul.

  Karl spent lavishly on art. He commissioned works from Auguste Rodin and financed the Secession Building, the city's exhibition hall and art gallery. Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Gretl for her wedding. Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family's many music rooms. The conductor Bruno Walter described life in the palace as having an “all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture.”

  Brahms, a regular visitor, noticed something less comfortable. He said the family seemed to act towards one another as if they were at court. The palace held seven grand pianos, and each sibling pursued music “with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological.” Anthony Gottlieb tells of Paul practising at one piano when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room: “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!”

  Ludwig himself had absolute pitch, and he could whistle long, detailed passages of music. He learned the clarinet in his 30s. A three-bar fragment he composed turned up in a 1931 notebook, found by Michael Nedo, director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge. His taste was strict. In 1930 he told his friend Drury: “Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery.”

  The biographer Ray Monk writes that Karl wanted to turn his sons into captains of industry. So the boys were kept out of school, lest they pick up bad habits, and were taught at home. The psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Ludwig's anxious, insecure mother could not stand up to him. The family seemed to carry a strong streak of depression.

  The eldest, Hans, was hailed as a musical prodigy. Alexander Waugh writes that at four he could identify the Doppler effect in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch. At five he cried “Wrong! Wrong!” when two brass bands at a carnival played the same tune in different keys. In May 1902 Hans ran away to the United States and vanished from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, most likely a suicide.

  On the 2nd of May 1904, the third eldest brother, Rudi, died by suicide in a Berlin bar. He was 22 and studying chemistry at the Berlin Academy. He asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's song “Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich,” which means forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I. Then he mixed himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide. One of his several notes told his parents he was grieving over the death of a friend. Another referred to his “perverted disposition.” It was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, the law that prohibited homosexual sex. Their father forbade the family from ever mentioning Rudi's name again.

  Kurt, the second eldest, was an officer and company director. He shot himself on the 27th of October 1918, just before the end of World War I, after the Austrian troops he commanded refused his orders and deserted en masse. Hermine said Kurt seemed to carry “the germ of disgust for life within himself.” Years later Ludwig wrote of himself: “I ought to have... become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth.”

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• 3. Faith and Identity

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  In 1903, at the age of 14, Wittgenstein finally entered a school, because Karl at last relented about keeping his youngest sons at home. Ludwig had failed the entrance examination for the academic Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt. After extra tutoring he barely passed the exam for the Imperial and Royal Realschule in Linz, a technically oriented state school of some 300 pupils. During term he lodged with the family of Josef Strigl, a teacher at the local gymnasium, who gave him the nickname Luki.

  Adolf Hitler attended the same school and was the same age, but he had been made to repeat his first year. Wittgenstein was placed two grades above him, and he was probably moved forward a year. Ray Monk and Hans Sluga note that there is no evidence the two ever had anything to do with each other.

  The historian Brigitte Hamann writes that Wittgenstein stood out among the boys. He spoke an unusually pure High German, with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable. The other boys sang after him: “Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts.” That means Wittgenstein wanders wistfully Vienna-wards in worsening winds. His leaving certificate gave him a 5, the top mark, in religious studies. But his spelling was so poor that he failed his written German exam. In 1931 he wrote that his bad spelling in youth was “connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study).”

  The top mark in religion is ironic, because it was at the Realschule that he decided he lacked religious faith. He still valued confession, and he made some to his oldest sister, Hermine. Monk speculates that they concerned his lost faith. Gretl recommended Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, and as a teenager Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's idealism. After studying the philosophy of mathematics, he abandoned it for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years he called Schopenhauer an ultimately “shallow” thinker.

  The year 1903 also brought Otto Weininger's book Geschlecht und Charakter, known in English as Sex and Character. Weininger shot himself shortly after it appeared, and Wittgenstein, then 14, attended the funeral. The book made sweeping, hostile claims about women and about Jews, and it argued that the only life worth living was the spiritual one. Decades later, as a professor at Cambridge, Wittgenstein handed out copies to his bemused colleagues. He said Weininger's arguments were wrong, but that the way they were wrong was interesting.

  On the 23rd of August 1931 he wrote to G. E. Moore that Weininger was “great and fantastic.” He added: “It is his enormous mistake which is great. I.e. roughly speaking if you just add a ‘~’ to the whole book it says an important truth.” The tilde is the logician's sign for “not.”

  Wittgenstein's mother, Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known to friends as Poldi, was the family's link to Catholicism. Her father was a Bohemian Jew, and her mother was an Austrian-Slovene Catholic, the only non-Jewish grandparent among the four. Poldi was also an aunt of the future Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. The children were brought up Roman Catholic. Still, Wittgenstein and his siblings were three-quarters Jewish by descent, and scholars debate how far they saw themselves, or were seen, as Jews.

  In his notebooks of around 1929-1931 he often called himself Jewish, usually in a self-deprecating way: “The saint is the only Jewish ‘genius’. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.)” In a 1949 conversation with Drury, he claimed his thoughts were “one hundred percent Hebraic.” Sluga argued this described a profoundly self-doubting Judaism, one that could collapse into self-hatred but also held a promise of innovation and genius.

  Religion never left him. In 1912 he wrote to Bertrand Russell that Mozart and Beethoven were the “actual” sons of God. Yet he found it hard to “bend the knee,” and he resisted organized religion. “I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view,” he said. On the 29th of April 1915, serving in the army, he wrote in his journal: “Perhaps the nearness of death 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.”

  From then on he treated faith as a way of living, not as belief that a doctrine is true. He opposed rational proofs for the existence of God. In 1947, finding it hard to work, he described a letter from a priest friend in Austria who hoped his work would go well, if it should be God's will. “Now that is all I want,” Wittgenstein wrote, “if it should be God's will.” His friend Norman Malcolm thought he was more deeply religious than many people who correctly regard themselves as believers.

  Toward the end he wrote: “Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby’. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”

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• 4. From Kites to Logic

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  On the 23rd of October 1906, Wittgenstein began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, Berlin, lodging with the family of Professor Jolles. He attended for three semesters and received a diploma on the 5th of May 1908. His interest had turned to aeronautics. In the spring of 1908 he arrived at the Victoria University of Manchester to study for a doctorate, full of plans to design and fly his own plane.

  At a meteorological observation site near Glossop in Derbyshire, he studied the behaviour of kites in the upper atmosphere under Sir Arthur Schuster. He also designed a propeller with small jet engines at the tips of its blades, which he patented in 1911. It earned him a research studentship in the autumn of 1908. Propeller designs of the time were not advanced enough to put the idea into practice.

  The work was frustrating, because Wittgenstein had very little experience with machinery. Jim Bamber, an engineer who was his friend and classmate, reported that when things went wrong, which often happened, Wittgenstein threw his arms around, stomped about and swore in German. According to another friend, William Eccles, he then turned to the design of the propeller in theory. That problem demanded sophisticated mathematics, and he soon became interested in its foundations.

  He read Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics, from 1903, and Frege's The Basic Laws of Arithmetic. Hermine said he became obsessed with mathematics and was losing interest in aeronautics. He described himself as in a “constant, indescribable, almost pathological state of agitation.”

  In the summer of 1911 he visited Frege at the University of Jena with some writing on logic, hoping to learn whether it was worth pursuing. He recalled that Frege “absolutely wiped the floor with me, and I felt very depressed; but at the end he said ‘You must come again’, so I cheered up.” Frege would talk about nothing but logic and mathematics. He also suggested that Wittgenstein study with Russell at Cambridge.

  On the 18th of October 1911, Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College. Russell was having tea with C. K. Ogden. He later wrote that an unknown German appeared, speaking little English but refusing to speak German. The visitor had learned engineering at Charlottenburg and had come to Cambridge on purpose to hear Russell lecture.

  Soon Wittgenstein was not just attending Russell's lectures but dominating them. Often Russell lectured only to C. D. Broad, E. H. Neville and H. T. J. Norton. Afterwards Wittgenstein followed Russell back to his rooms to argue until the evening meal. Russell wrote to his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell: “My German friend threatens to be an infliction.”

  He soon changed his mind. Russell wrote in November 1911 that he had first suspected a crank, partly because Wittgenstein once insisted that all existential propositions are meaningless. Russell invited him to consider the proposition “There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.” Wittgenstein refused to believe it. Russell looked under all the desks without finding one, but Wittgenstein remained unconvinced.

  Three months after the arrival, Russell told Morrell: “I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve.” Wittgenstein later told David Pinsent that Russell's encouragement had ended nine years of loneliness and suffering, during which he had continually thought of suicide. By 1916 the roles had reversed. After Wittgenstein criticized his work, Russell wrote that the criticism affected everything he had done since. “I saw that he was right,” Russell wrote, “and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”

  In 1912 Wittgenstein joined the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. On the 29th of November that year he delivered a four-minute paper defining philosophy as “all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences.” He dominated the club so thoroughly that in the early 1930s he stopped attending for a time, after complaints that he gave no one else a chance to speak.

  The club became infamous for a meeting on the 25th of October 1946, in Richard Braithwaite's rooms in King's College. The guest speaker was Karl Popper, another Viennese philosopher, whose paper was titled “Are there philosophical problems?” Popper argued that philosophical problems are real, not just linguistic puzzles. Accounts vary, but Wittgenstein apparently waved a hot poker and demanded a moral rule. Popper offered one: “Not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers.” Russell told Wittgenstein he had misunderstood, and Wittgenstein left. Popper said he “stormed out,” though leaving early had become Wittgenstein's habit. It was the only time the three eminent philosophers were ever in one room. The minutes record a meeting “charged to an unusual degree with a spirit of controversy.”

  John Maynard Keynes invited Wittgenstein to join the Cambridge Apostles, an elite secret society formed in 1820, which both Russell and Moore had joined as students. Russell worried that Wittgenstein would dislike its raucous debate, its precious humour, and the fact that members were often in love with one another. Wittgenstein was admitted in 1912 and resigned almost immediately. The society welcomed him back to meetings in the 1920s.

  That same summer of 1912, Russell introduced him to a mathematics undergraduate named David Pinsent.

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• 5. Norway and David Pinsent

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  David Hume Pinsent, a mathematics undergraduate and a relation of the philosopher David Hume, became Wittgenstein's closest companion in 1912. The two worked together on experiments in the psychology laboratory about the role of rhythm in appreciating music. Wittgenstein delivered a paper on the subject to the British Psychological Association in Cambridge that year.

  In September 1912 they travelled to Iceland, with Wittgenstein paying for everything. That included first-class travel, the hire of a private train, and new clothes and spending money for Pinsent. In 1913 they went to Norway. At a tourist office they asked for a small village on a fjord, away from tourists and peaceful enough for studying logic and law. They chose Øystese and arrived on the 4th of September 1913. In a vacation of almost three weeks, Wittgenstein made immense progress in logic. He told Pinsent he wanted to leave Cambridge and return to Norway to continue.

  Pinsent's diaries show a sensitive, nervous friend, attuned to the tiniest change in Pinsent's mood. They also show a man who could be “absolutely sulky and snappish.” Shopping for furniture for Wittgenstein's rooms in Trinity, Pinsent wrote, was amusing. Wittgenstein was “terribly fastidious” and said “No - Beastly!” to 90 percent of what the shopman showed them. In May 1912 Pinsent noted the naive surprise with which Wittgenstein discovered that the philosophers he had once worshipped in ignorance made disgusting mistakes.

  They last saw each other on the 8th of October 1913 at Lordswood House in Birmingham, the Pinsent family home. Pinsent rose at 6:15 to see his friend off in a taxi at 7:00 for the 7:30 train from New Street Station. “It was sad parting from him,” he wrote. Wittgenstein went to live in Norway.

  Wittgenstein is generally believed to have fallen in love with at least three men: Pinsent in 1912, Francis Skinner in 1930 and Ben Richards in the late 1940s. He had also loved women. In the 1920s he fell in love with a young Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, sculpted a bust modelled on her, and seriously considered marriage, on condition that they would not have children. She decided he was not right for her.

  Karl Wittgenstein had died on the 20th of January 1913, and Ludwig inherited a fortune that made him one of the wealthiest men in Europe. At first anonymously, he gave money to Austrian artists and writers chosen by Ludwig von Ficker, editor of Der Brenner. They included Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, the architect Adolf Loos and the painter Oskar Kokoschka. Trakl asked to meet his benefactor, but when Wittgenstein visited in 1914, Trakl had killed himself.

  That winter Wittgenstein rented the second floor of a house in the Norwegian village of Skjolden, because he felt he could not reach his deepest questions among other academics. He learned Norwegian to talk with the villagers, and Danish to read Søren Kierkegaard. When even Skjolden grew too busy, he designed a small wooden house on a remote rock above the lake Eidsvatnet. Locals called the place “Østerrike,” meaning Austria. He lived there on and off until the 1930s, and substantial parts of his work were written there.

  In Norway he wrote Logik, or Notes on Logic, the predecessor of much of the Tractatus. He became convinced that all the propositions of logic are generalizations of tautologies, and the reverse. He wrote to Russell in late 1913: “The big question now is, how must a system of signs be constituted in order to make every tautology recognizable as such IN ONE AND THE SAME WAY? This is the fundamental problem of logic!” He believed that if he failed to solve it, he had no right to live. By the time he wrote the Tractatus he had given up on the quest. Instead he held that every tautology shows by itself that it is one.

  In April 1914 Moore, by then a Cambridge don, visited Norway at Wittgenstein's insistence, though reluctantly because Wittgenstein exhausted him. The biographers David Edmonds and John Eidinow write that Wittgenstein regarded Moore as proof of how far a man could get with “absolutely no intelligence whatever.” Moore was expected to act as secretary and take down notes, and Wittgenstein fell into a rage when he got something wrong.

  Brian McGuinness notes that Wittgenstein meant to submit an essay called “Logik” as the dissertation for a bachelor's degree. Regulations required a preface and notes on sources, and the essay had neither. Moore, who was secretary of the relevant degrees committee, showed it to Walter Morley Fletcher. Fletcher said it could not possibly pass. When Moore wrote to say so, Wittgenstein was furious: “If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to HELL directly; and if I am worth it and you don't do it then - by God - you might go there.”

  Moore wrote in his diary that he felt sick and could not get the letter out of his head. In July Wittgenstein conceded that he had probably no sufficient reason to write as he did. Even so, the two did not speak again until 1929.

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• 6. Trenches and the Treatise

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  On the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army at once, though he was eligible for a medical exemption. He served first on a ship, then in an artillery workshop several miles from the action. An accidental explosion wounded him, and he was hospitalised in Kraków. In March 1916 he was posted to the Russian front with the Austrian 7th Army, which defended against the Brusilov Offensive in some of the heaviest fighting.

  There he directed artillery fire from an observation post in no-man's land, one of the most dangerous jobs because enemy fire targeted it. He received the Military Merit Medal with Swords on the Ribbon. The army commended his “exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism,” which “won the total admiration of the troops.” In January 1917 he joined a howitzer regiment on the Russian front and won several more medals, including the Silver Medal for Valour, First Class.

  In 1918 he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to the Italian front with an artillery regiment. For his part in the final Austrian offensive of June 1918 he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, one of the army's highest honours. He received the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords instead, because the action, though extraordinarily brave, was judged insufficiently consequential. Also in 1916, as his sister reported, he donated a million crowns toward building a 30 cm mortar.

  Throughout the war he kept notebooks that mixed philosophical reflection with personal remarks, including contempt for the character of other soldiers. On the 11th of June 1915 he wrote: “The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.” On the 8th of July he added: “To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”

  In a bookshop in Tarnów he found Leo Tolstoy's 1896 The Gospel in Brief. He carried it everywhere and recommended it to anyone in distress, until fellow soldiers knew him as “the man with the gospels.” Its mark is visible in the Tractatus, because both books number their sentences in the same unusual way. In 1916 he read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages by heart. He especially loved the speeches of the elder Zosima, a holy man “who could see directly into the souls of other people.” Russell said Wittgenstein came back from the war a changed man, deeply mystical and ascetic.

  In the summer of 1918 he took military leave at Neuwaldegg, one of his family's Vienna summer houses. There, in August 1918, he completed the Tractatus. He submitted it under the title Der Satz to the publishers Jahoda and Siegel. The word means proposition or sentence, but also “leap.”

  A run of blows followed. His uncle Paul died on the 13th of August. On the 25th of October the publishers decided not to print the book. Then Pinsent's mother wrote that her son had been killed in a plane crash on the 8th of May. Wittgenstein was distraught to the point of being suicidal.

  He was sent back to the Italian front after his leave. When the Austrian army was defeated, Allied forces captured him on the 3rd of November in Trentino. He spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp. On the 25th of August 1919 he returned to his family in Vienna, by all accounts physically and mentally spent. He talked incessantly about suicide, terrifying his sisters and his brother Paul.

  He resolved to do two things: train as an elementary school teacher and get rid of his fortune. In 1914 it had provided an income of 300,000 Kronen a year. By 1919 it was worth a great deal more, with a sizable portfolio of investments in the United States and the Netherlands. He divided it among his siblings, except for Margarete, and insisted it not be held in trust for him. His family saw him as ill and went along.

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• 7. The Village Schoolmaster

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  In September 1919, Wittgenstein enrolled at the teacher training college in the Kundmanngasse in Vienna. His sister Hermine said that his working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates. The writer Thomas Bernhard was harsher: “the multi-millionaire as a village schoolmaster is surely a piece of perversity.” In the summer of 1920 Wittgenstein worked as a gardener for a monastery. He then applied under a false name for a teaching post at Reichenau and won it, but declined when his identity was discovered. He no longer wished to be recognized as a Wittgenstein.

  His brother Paul objected in a letter that it was “completely out of the question” for anyone with their name and an upbringing visible “a thousand paces off” to pass unidentified. Later in 1920 Wittgenstein took his first job as a primary school teacher, under his real name, in Trattenbach, a remote village of a few hundred people.

  His first letters called Trattenbach beautiful. By October 1921 he told Russell: “I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness.” The villagers gossiped about him as eccentric at best. He got on badly with the other teachers, and when his lodgings were too noisy he made a bed in the school kitchen. He offered late-night extra tuition to several pupils, which did not endear him to their parents. Hermine, watching him teach, said the students “literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations.”

  To the less able, he became something of a tyrant. The first two hours of every day went to mathematics, and Monk writes that some pupils recalled those hours with horror. They reported that he caned the boys, boxed their ears, and pulled the girls' hair. Hitting boys was not unusual then, but villagers thought it went too far to do it to girls. Girls, after all, were not expected to understand algebra, much less have their ears boxed over it. He became a local legend, shouting “Krautsalat!” when the headmaster played the piano and “Nonsense!” when a priest answered children's questions.

  In September 1922 he moved to a school in Hassbach but found its people no better. “These people are not human at all but loathsome worms,” he wrote to a friend, and he left after a month. In November he began work in Puchberg, in the Schneeberg mountains. There, he told Russell, the villagers were “one-quarter animal and three-quarters human.”

  Frank Ramsey visited him in Puchberg on the 17th of September 1923 to discuss the Tractatus, which Ramsey had already reviewed for Mind. During their talks they made a number of corrections to the German and English texts in Ramsey's copy, and most were incorporated into the second edition of 1933. Ramsey reported that Wittgenstein lived in one tiny whitewashed room with space only for a bed, a washstand, a small table and one small hard chair. They shared an evening meal of coarse bread, butter and cocoa.

  Ramsey also wrote to Keynes that Wittgenstein's very rich family was anxious to help, but he rejected every offer, even Christmas presents and invalid's food when he was ill. “He won't have any money he hasn't earned,” Ramsey wrote. “It is an awful pity.” A campaign began among his friends to bring him back to Cambridge.

  In September 1924 he moved to Otterthal, near Trattenbach, where the headmaster was Josef Putre, a socialist and a friend from Trattenbach. There he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for the children, the Wörterbuch für Volksschulen. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky published it in Vienna in 1926, and it was his only other book published in his lifetime besides the Tractatus. A first edition sold in 2005 for £75,000. In 2020 an English version, Word Book, appeared, translated by the art historian Bettina Funcke and illustrated by Paul Chan.

  The preface was withheld at the publisher's request, but it survives in a 1925 typescript. In it Wittgenstein takes a clear stand for a Standard Austrian German. He wrote that the dictionary should include only the words known to Austrian elementary students, and that it therefore excludes many a good German word unusual in Austria. He thus became one of the earliest advocates of a German with more than one standard variety, decades before such debates began.

  In April 1926 came the incident known as Der Vorfall Haidbauer. Josef Haidbauer was an 11-year-old whose father had died and whose mother worked as a local maid. He was a slow learner. One day Wittgenstein hit him two or three times on the head, and the boy collapsed. Wittgenstein carried him to the headmaster's office and quickly left the school. In the hall he ran into a parent, Herr Piribauer, whom the children had sent for. Wittgenstein had earlier pulled Piribauer's daughter, Hermine, by the ears so hard that they bled.

  Piribauer recalled calling Wittgenstein “all the names under the sun,” including an animal-trainer, and threatening to fetch the police. The village police station was empty, and the next day he was told Wittgenstein had disappeared. On the 28th of April 1926, Wittgenstein handed his resignation to the school inspector Wilhelm Kundt, who tried to persuade him to stay. Wittgenstein was adamant that his days as a schoolteacher were over.

  Proceedings began in May, and the judge ordered a psychiatric report. In August 1926 a letter from his friend Ludwig Hänsel shows hearings were still going on, but nothing is known about the case after that. Waugh suggests that the family and their money may have had a hand in covering it up. Waugh writes that Haidbauer died shortly afterwards of haemophilia. Monk says he died at 14 of leukaemia.

  In 1936, as part of a series of “confessions,” Wittgenstein appeared in the village without warning. He wanted to confess in person and ask pardon of the children he had hit. He visited at least four of them, including Hermine Piribauer, who answered only “Ja, ja.” Other former students were more welcoming. Monk writes that the purpose was not to hurt his pride as a punishment but to dismantle it. Of the apologies Wittgenstein wrote: “This brought me into more settled waters... and to greater seriousness.”

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• 8. The Book and Its Readers

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  The Tractatus first appeared in print in 1921, in German, as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie. Wittgenstein was unhappy with the result and called it a pirate edition. Russell had agreed to write an introduction explaining why the book mattered. Otherwise it was unlikely to be published at all, because it was difficult, if not impossible, to understand, and its author was unknown in philosophy. Yet Wittgenstein had lost faith in Russell, finding him glib and his philosophy mechanistic, and felt that Russell had fundamentally misunderstood the book.

  An English translation was prepared in Cambridge by C. K. Ogden with Frank Ramsey. Moore suggested the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Cambridge University Press turned the book down because Wittgenstein insisted it appear without Russell's introduction. In 1922 he agreed that Kegan Paul would print a bilingual edition with the introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation.

  That translation is problematic. Wittgenstein's English was poor at the time, and Ramsey was a teenager who had only recently learned German. So philosophers often prefer the 1961 translation by David Pears and Brian McGuinness. Wittgenstein apologized to Ogden for the shortness of the book, telling him: “If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me.”

  In a letter to Russell, Wittgenstein named the book's main point as the theory of what can be expressed by propositions, and thus thought, and what can only be shown. He called this the cardinal problem of philosophy. The logical structure of language, he argued, sets the limits of meaning, and the limits of language are the limits of philosophy. “What we can say at all can be said clearly,” he wrote. Religion, ethics, aesthetics and the mystical cannot be discussed. They are not nonsensical in themselves, but any statement about them must be. In the preface he declared that the book “will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking.”

  The book is built from seven numbered propositions, with sub-levels such as 1.1 and 1.11. The first reads: “The world is everything that is the case.” The seventh reads: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The early Wittgenstein believed that by explaining the logic that links propositions to the world, he had solved all philosophical problems.

  A discussion group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians in Vienna, the Vienna Circle, supposedly took its inspiration from reading the Tractatus. Many people assume Wittgenstein belonged to it. The philosopher Oswald Hanfling is blunt: “Wittgenstein was never a member of the Circle, though he was in Vienna during much of the time.” Brian McGuinness doubts he ever attended a meeting of the Circle proper. Hanfling nonetheless asserts that his influence on the Circle's thought was at least as important as that of any member.

  A. C. Grayling disagrees. In his view, superficial similarities between the Tractatus and logical positivism led members to study it and to arrange discussions with its author. But the Circle's fundamental views were already formed, with roots in the British empiricists, Ernst Mach, and the logic of Frege and Russell. Grayling says Wittgenstein's influence was mostly limited to Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann. Even there, he says, it had little lasting effect on their positivism.

  Schlick first met Wittgenstein in 1927 and did so several times before Wittgenstein agreed to meet any of his colleagues. From 1927 to 1928, Wittgenstein met small groups that included Schlick, almost always Waismann, sometimes Rudolf Carnap, and sometimes Herbert Feigl and his future wife, Maria Kesper. From 1929 his contact was restricted to Schlick and Waismann. Waismann recorded their conversations from December 1929 to March 1932, and they were published in English in 1979 as Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle.

  Carnap, in his autobiography, called Wittgenstein the thinker who most inspired him. But he noted a striking difference in attitude. He and Schlick treated philosophical problems much as scientists treat theirs. Wittgenstein's outlook, Carnap wrote, was much more like that of a creative artist, and one might almost say a religious prophet or a seer.

  Wittgenstein himself was moving away from the Tractatus. From 1929 to 1947 he taught at the University of Cambridge. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the Tractatus's assumptions and argued that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a language game. In his own words: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ - though not for all - this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” That argument fills the pages of Philosophical Investigations, which was published in 1953.

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