Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889—1951) Austrian philosopher, generally regarded as one of the most important of the twentieth century, not the least because his work bridged the usually insuperable divide between analytic philosophy (particularly the branch known as logical positivism) and continental philosophy. His notion of language games played a very important role in this regard. Wittgenstein’s work was predominantly concerned with the theory of meaning. An eccentric figure, his life story has been the subject of film---Wittgenstein (1993), scripted by Eagleton, Terry and directed by Derek Jarman---as well as several speculative novels. Biographers have had a field day with his life. Ray Monk’s excellent biography presents him as a tormented genius, while Kimberley Cornish’s more fanciful effort claims him as a Soviet spy linked to the so-called Cambridge Five. He was born in Vienna into a family of assimilated Jews. The children were all baptized as Roman Catholics. Wittgenstein’s father was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He made his fortune in iron and steel, then at a quite young age consolidated his wealth into real estate and retired from active involvement in his company so as to devote time to the arts. He commissioned paintings by Klimt and sculptures by Rodin and music from Mahler and Brahms. All the Wittgenstein children were talented. His elder brother Paul was an internationally renowned pianist, who even managed to continue on the concert circuit after losing an arm in World War I. In such a household, Ludwig felt like something of a failure. It was evidently an unhappy household, too, as three of his brothers committed suicide, and all of them including Ludwig suffered from depression. Philosophy was something that Wittgenstein only became aware of when he entered university. Initially he was interested in engineering, particularly aeronautics, and this is what he studied, first in Berlin, then in Manchester. While he was in England he started reading work on the foundation of mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Frege, Gottlob. He visited the latter, who advised him to study with Russell, so in 1911 he went to Cambridge to do precisely that. Russell was immediately impressed by his intelligence and encouraged his work. But to write and think properly, Wittgenstein needed solitude, so in 1913 he took himself to an isolated hut in Norway and there wrote what was effectively the first draft of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Further work on it was delayed by the outbreak of World War I. Wittgenstein returned to his native country and volunteered for the army, and served in the artillery on both the Russian and Italian fronts, winning several decorations for valour. On leave from the front, late in the summer of 1918, Wittgenstein received the sad news that one of his closest friends had been killed in an air crash. Almost suicidal with grief, Wittgenstein retreated to his Uncle Paul’s house, and there completed the final manuscript of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In spite of its later reputation as one of the most important works of philosophy of the twentieth century, it was initially very difficult to find a publisher willing to take it on, and in all probability would not have been published without the assistance of Bertrand Russell. In Wittgenstein’s own mind, the Tractatus had solved all the basic problems of philosophy that interested him, so he decided there was no point in pursuing a career as a philosopher. He opted to become a primary school teacher instead. He also wanted to unburden himself of his family legacy, so he gave his not inconsiderable inheritance to his brothers and sisters and returned to Austria. But as perhaps might have been expected, Wittgenstein was not well suited to the task of teaching young children and he was forced to resign in 1926. In somewhat of a slump and feeling a failure as a teacher, Wittgenstein worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and contemplated taking orders. He was woken out of his mental and spiritual torpor by the offer from his sister to design her new house. He leapt at the chance and designed a house of such austere beauty that his other sister described it as being fit only for gods, not humans. Wittgenstein slaved over every detail, right down to the design of the window latches. The house still stands today and is used as a cultural centre. Moritz Schlick, the leading figure in the Vienna Circle, contacted Wittgenstein as he was completing work on the house and persuaded him to meet with him and some of his colleagues, who were admirers of the Tractatus. These meetings, which Wittgenstein often found very frustrating, stimulated him into thinking he had more to give philosophically speaking, and more importantly, started him thinking that perhaps the Tractatus contained grave errors that needed to be remedied. So in 1929 he returned to Cambridge. Reflecting on the occasion, his friend John Maynard Keynes famously wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.’ At Russell’s suggestion the Tractatus was submitted as a PhD so that Wittgenstein could obtain the requisite qualification to teach at Cambridge (at that point he did not even have an undergraduate degree). With extended sabbaticals in Russia, Norway, and Ireland, as well as a long stint working as a medical orderly in Newcastle and London during World War II, Wittgenstein worked at Cambridge until 1947. He resigned his post then in order to concentrate on writing, which he found himself unable to do in what he perceived to be the stifling atmosphere of Cambridge. For the next three years, before he succumbed to cancer, he led a peripatetic existence travelling and writing. Although the Tractatus was the only work of philosophy published in his own lifetime, he left behind hundreds of pages of manuscript that have since been shaped into books and published, the most important of which is undoubtedly Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953), translated as Philosophical Investigations (1953). It is customary to divide Wittgenstein’s career into two parts---the first part is determined by the abstract formalism of the Tractatus, which rejects even its own meaningfulness because its meaning has to be constructed on the basis of context; the second part is determined by Philosophical Investigations, or the PI as it is usually known, which does a complete turnaround and argues that it is only by dealing with context that meaning is possible, and introduces the idea of the language game to try to deal with it. Further Reading: A. C. Grayling Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (2001). R. Monk Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990). R. Monk How to Read Wittgenstein (2005).