One of the great questions of the humanities – and across the liberal arts – is the connection between a writer, researcher, scientist, or artist and his or her work: between biography and thought. I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure there is one. One can certainly appreciate the work of Michelangelo, Mozart, Wittgenstein, of Virginia Woolf, without knowing much about their personal lives. But both the work and the life are products of the same human psyche.
We instinctively want to know how great thinkers lived, what drove them, what limited them. There’s a zone of uncertainty about how they overlap, and how important such overlap is to their contributions to art or learning or science. And zones of uncertainty aren’t just necessary; they’re a kind of beauty as well. We will focus here on Wittgenstein, whose extraordinary life and work demonstrated how one thinker can open so many windows and let in so much fresh air.
Let me begin by admitting that “Wittgenstein and the Liberal Arts” sounds like a slightly odd title for a post – especially to anyone who is familiar with that philosopher. But then, almost everything about Wittgenstein the man (as opposed to the thinker) was odd. What isn’t odd is that Wittgenstein transformed philosophy in the 20th century; and philosophy is the hub of the liberal arts, while the other disciplines are spokes. Note, however, that I didn’t say “merely spokes.” It takes spokes too, not just hubs, to make a wheel.
If you’re unfamiliar with the work, here’s the good news: first, he’s arguably the most important and original philosopher of the 20th century, and in fact, since Hegel; and second, most of his work (with one big exception) is highly accessible to the curious lay reader. (The only conceivable rival for that claim would be Martin Heidegger, whose importance I don’t deny, despite his notorious obscurity and his affinity for Nazism.) Wittgenstein’s legacy is too vast and complex for a single post. Hence, this one will try to sketch out the window he opened, and the next will lean out of that window a bit, so to speak.
He was – and remains – a fascinating and elusive figure: tortured, unstable, self-defeating, socially awkward if not obnoxious, and brilliant. Since his death in 1951, philosophers have endlessly debated his work, which speaks to its philosophic value. Nearly all of it was published posthumously based on lecture notes of his students (including Elizabeth Anscombe who managed his estate), and the untidy scribblings he left behind, some of it merely notes that students took at his lectures, which were rendered into excellent books following his death in 1951.
Wittgenstein’s work and his life and character are equally intriguing. He was born in 1889 to an enormously wealthy Viennese family. His father was a steel magnate, one of the wealthiest men in Austria, and along with his eight siblings, he was literally raised in a palace, the “Palais Wittgenstein.” Ludwig was three-quarters Jewish, but raised mainly Catholic in deeply antisemitic Vienna – and though he never practiced Catholicism as an adult, he burned with (and was arguably tortured by) questions of a religious or spiritual nature. Coming from a family that knew Brahms and Mahler, among other musical giants, one of his greatest passions was classical music. At least two and possibly three of his four older brothers committed suicide in early adulthood. The surviving siblings didn’t always get along.
Wittgenstein had only three years of formal schooling, because his overbearing father insisted on private tutors. But he did spend several of his pre-teen years at a school in Linz, where another student his age (whom he may or may not have known) was Adolf Hitler. Ludwig went on to study aeronautical engineering and was a brilliant student – he held a patent for a propeller design; but he became interested in logic and mathematics, leading to personal contacts with two of the greatest logicians of his time: Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell. And so, after studying engineering in Manchester, he went to Cambridge to study with Russell.
At the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein returned home and served in the Austrian Army, where he was decorated for frequent and even reckless acts of bravery. The only book he published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, originated in notes he took during the War, and in an Italian POW camp. It came out in German in 1921, and in English (with Russell’s help) in 1922, despite a skeptical preface by Russell that offended the author. The work is only 75 pages, but beware: it’s possibly the densest, most debated, and most confounding work of philosophy ever written. It has even been argued that it was intended to confuse the readers, and to steer them through and beyond that confusion. Some claim to fully understand it; after some three readings, I’m not among them.
Everything else that Wittgenstein wrote (with the sole exception of an essay in the late-1920s) was published posthumously, stitched together from his chaotic legacy of manuscripts by colleagues and former students. And both in style and substance, those books are radically different from the Tractatus. The most important of them is the monumental (but not over-long) Philosophical Investigations. Several of the shorter works (such as the Blue Book and the Brown Book) were basically practice runs for the Investigations. But On Certainty, Zettel (“Notebooks”) and several other “Late Wittgenstein” volumes have much to offer.
Personally, Wittgenstein was aggressive, intolerant, compulsively argumentative, and had a cruel streak that on several occasions led to violence or the threat of it. (As a schoolteacher in rural Austria in the 1920s, he was fired for hitting a girl in his class; later, at Cambridge, he famously threatened a rival thinker with a poker.) But he was also generous and ascetic; after his father died early on, he gave away his enormous fortune to his sisters, and to poets and artists including Rilke and Klimt. And although he had a few relationships with women (and adored his sisters) he was homosexual.
His troubled life was thus shaped by all manner of problematic or destructive forces: vast wealth and asceticism, religious and sexual ambivalence, wartime suffering and sacrifice, a complex and conflicted personality, and personal tragedy. But that life was an incessant search for meaning and beauty; and once he applied himself to philosophy, he transformed it. This, despite the fact that he scorned (and claimed never to have read) most traditional philosophy.
Wittgenstein primarily explored how language produces understanding – or more often, misunderstanding. He revolutionized philosophy by putting words – and how we use them – front and center, and with an obsessive concern for truth and (the Tractatus notwithstanding) clarity. His consuming philosophical passion was for logical rigor as the ultimate cornerstone of human reality; arguably he wanted logic to do too much – to do everything, in fact, and prove the uselessness of all other divisions of philosophy.
For many readers, however, and especially for non-philosophers (I consider myself to awkwardly straddle that boundary) the logic of the Tractatus is secondary to his the posthumous work, which stands out for other reasons: for its accessibility as a way into philosophical problems; for its sheer common sense and lack of dogmatism; for magnificent metaphors, analogies, and examples; and for a style that was almost like a Platonic dialogue with the reader.
To me, this is what makes Wittgenstein an avatar not just of philosophy but of liberal learning: the stepwise guiding of his reader without traditional argumentation. For him, philosophy wasn’t discoursing so much as sharing. (It may not have been true of his lectures or conversation, which by all accounts revealed incredible arrogance; but his writing is otherwise.)
Open the Investigations to any page and read: you will be caught up in a web of profound but never technical philosophical wandering. It is a loosely defined but never aimless path leading to other paths. The style is as open and accessible as Wittgenstein himself was not. It is marked not marked by extended chains of reasoning toward particular conclusions, but rather by probing, questioning, and inviting people to look at the world his way.
In both style and content, Wittgenstein’s late work is both important (having preoccupied professional philosophy for the past 75 years) and highly accessible to the lay reader – especially the reader who understands that philosophy, as the progenitor of rational thinking, constitutes the hub of the wheel of liberal learning. Yes, it’s great philosophy– but also great critical thinking, which is the kind of philosophy we all do when we think clearly and well.