Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, was born in Vienna in April, 1889, the youngest of eight children. While the house of Wittgenstein had been prominent in Austria since the early nineteenth century, Ludwig’s father, Karl, an engineer, moved it from prominence to great riches with his brilliant manipulations of the steel industry. When he died, in 1913, The Times of London eulogized him as “The Carnegie of Austria.” Though the Wittgensteins were of Jewish ancestry—a fact that Ludwig would later take considerable pains to conceal—they had been Protestant for two generations. His mother, Leopoldine, was Roman Catholic and Ludwig, like his brothers and sisters, was baptized Catholic. Though there are good reasons to describe his Weltanschauung as fundamentally religious—Bertrand Russell went so far on one occasion as to call him “a complete mystic” (“mystic” being a term of derision for Russell)—Wittgenstein was not a church-goer and seems to have had little sympathy with what has come to be called “organized religion.”

In many respects, the Wittgensteins were the very embodiment of Viennese haut bourgeois sensibility and patrician splendor. In the first volume of his new biography of the philosopher, Brian McGuinness, a longtime student of Wittgenstein’s thought and a Fellow at Queen’s College, Oxford, even employs the adjective wittgensteinisch to describe that combination of concentration, largesse, and nervous self-absorption that seemed to define the family.[1] Though he later affected a spartan simplicity that bordered on the comical, Ludwig grew up in an atmosphere of old-world noblesse oblige. As befitted this station in life, he displayed an openhanded generosity toward his various cultural enthusiasms, arranging, for example, for a large anonymous gift to Austrian artists and writers that aided Adolf Loos, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Oskar Kokoschka, among others. Sometimes his benefactions were less effective, as when, during the Great War, he donated one million crowns to the state for the purchase of a 30 cm. caliber mortar to aid the war effort. In any event, Mr. McGuinness is correct that in the opening decades of the century the Wittgensteins “belonged to a spacious world with time as well as energy enough, and above all to a culture not yet fragmented and specialized, so that the music they made, or the pictures they painted, at home differed in degree perhaps but not in kind from the highest achievements of their age.” Ludwig’s sister Margaret had her portrait painted by Gustav Klimt, and (what is equally impressive) Karl Wittgenstein was often a target of Karl Kraus’s barbs in the satirical periodical Die Fachel.

It was music, especially, that united the family. F. R. Leavis recalled Wittgenstein’s once having told him that there were seven grand pianos in one of his family’s homes. Clara Schumann had taught Karl Wittgenstein’s sisters to play the piano, Brahms was a good family friend, and Leopoldine— who, according to Mr. McGuinness, brought to her household “a moral earnestness and selflessness which it is proper to call extreme"—is said to have been an exceptionally accomplished pianist. Ludwig himself, with characteristic idiosyncrasy, took up the clarinet instead of the piano, and could reputedly whistle with prodigious accuracy, reproducing whole concertos or (a favorite pastime) whistling the melody of Schubert’s songs while a friend accompanied him on the piano.

Young Ludwig was educated at home by private tutors until the age of fourteen, when he was sent to secondary school in Linz (the same school that was later attended by Adolf Hitler). He was apparently an indifferent student, though he learned French well and mastered English. Upon graduating in 1906, he decided, faute de mieux, to follow in his father’s footsteps and embark on a career in engineering. After spending two unhappy years in Berlin studying mechanical engineering and aeronautics, he went to England to continue his studies at Manchester University. He is said to have done important work in aeronautics there; more important, it was around this time that he became interested in the foundations of mathematics and logic, the subjects that would lead him to Cambridge to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911.

Despite his favored upbringing, Ludwig was visited by much unhappiness and personal tragedy. Three of his four brothers committed suicide, and the fourth, Paul, a pianist, lost his right arm in World War I. (Paul Wittgenstein nonetheless went on to have a distinguished career as a pianist, performing works he commissioned for the left hand.) Ludwig himself was of a melancholy, tortured disposition and, at least as a young adult, often brooded about committing suicide.

All this Mr. McGuinness recounts in his chronicle of the first thirty-one years of Wittgenstein’s life (the second volume of his biography will continue the story through 1951, the year of Wittgenstein’s death at the age of sixty-two). As anyone acquainted with the reputation of the philosopher would have predicted, Wittgenstein emerges as the very archetype, indeed—as the many stories about him have hardened into academic folklore— almost the very caricature of the angst-ridden genius. Bertrand Russell’s remark that Wittgenstein was “perhaps the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” is wholly typical.

It was precisely Wittgenstein’s appearance as a “genius as traditionally conceived” (along no doubt with his fortune and solemn good looks) that initially captivated Cambridge academic “society” and won him the attention of everyone from G. E. Moore and Russell to John Maynard Keynes and the Bloomsbury set. For though Wittgenstein’s writings are fairly voluminous, he published very little during his lifetime. Aside from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a book of some twenty thousand words—he published one brief review of a textbook on logic, an article in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and an elementary language handbook for schoolchildren. His other major work, the Philosophical Investigations, a loosely connected series of remarks dealing with various aspects of language and logic, appeared posthumously in 1953. There have followed numerous volumes of notes, lectures, and miscellaneous reflections, some of them running to five hundred pages.

Because of the myths that have grown up around Wittgenstein, his eccentricities have been amply noted, repeated, elaborated, and sometimes simply invented. Often multiple versions of the same story appear. Russell, whose many passions included an extremely well developed taste for gossip, often “improves” his anecdotes about Wittgenstein as he recounts the same incidents in sundry letters and reminiscences. He transforms, for example, what was apparently a shy and even touching appeal by Wittgenstein for guidance and assurance about his philosophical abilities into a typical case of wittgensteinisch eccentricity:

Wittgenstein: “Will you tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?” Russell: “My dear fellow, I don’t know. Why are you asking me?” Wittgenstein: “Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.”

One of the main privileges of getting to know Wittgenstein—but also, of course, one of the signal liabilities—was having the benefit of his critical acumen. The penetration and fundamental nature of his criticism could sometimes be paralyzing. After digesting Wittgenstein’s comments on his work on the theory of knowledge, Russell— not generally a man lacking in self-confidence—confided to his current mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, “I saw that he was right and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.” Nor did Wittgenstein confine his criticism to the realm of ideas. He was endlessly analyzing his relations with others, rehearsing his faults and theirs, nursing real or imagined slights, “pulling up feelings by the roots,” as Russell put it, “trying to get the exact truth of what one feels towards him.”

Wittgenstein’s decision to go to Cambridge to study with Russell seems to have been made on the spur of the moment. While we have no conclusive documentary evidence, the great German mathematician Gottlob Frege, whom Wittgenstein visited in 1911, is credited with having advised him to study with Russell, who was seventeen years Wittgenstein’s senior and then at the peak of his philosophical powers. After they became acquainted, Wittgenstein would typically come to Russell’s rooms to talk at four or five in the afternoon, stay until Russell left for dinner, and then come back in the evening for several more hours of discussion and argument. Like almost everyone who encountered Wittgenstein, Russell would soon come under the spell of his brilliance. Within a year or so he found himself dutifully taking down the reflections on logic that Wittgenstein dictated as he paced the room nervously, just as G. E. Moore would later find himself enlisted as Wittgenstein’s amanuensis. But Wittgenstein’s captivating effect on Russell was not immediate. Russell’s letters to Lady Ottoline at the time provide something of a chronicle of his developing acquaintance with the young philosopher, showing that, in the beginning at least, exasperation competed heartily with admiration in Russell’s feelings about his peculiar new student.

My German friend threatens to be an infliction. (19 October) My German, who seems to be rather good, was very argumentative. (25 October) My German was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn’t admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. (1 November) My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable—I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t. (2 November)

As their acquaintance deepened into friendship—and before it disintegrated into the wary formality of botched intimacy, as so often happened with Wittgenstein’s friendships—Russell became one of Wittgenstein’s spiritual confidants. The role cannot have been an unalloyed blessing. “On arrival,” Russell reports, “he would announce that when he left my rooms he would commit suicide. So, in spite of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out. On one such evening after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, ‘Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or your sins?’ ‘Both,’ he said, and then reverted to silence.”

Wittgenstein’s impatience led him to rebel against methodical argumentation in favor of an extremely compressed, epigrammatic style of writing. This would assume full flower in Wittgenstein’s later obiter dicta, in which, for example, he declares that “a good picture should have the effect of a box on the ear.” But already in 1912 we find Russell informing a correspondent that “I told him he ought not simply state what he thinks true but give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.” Framing arguments, as both the Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus and the Philosophical Investigations show, was not what Wittgenstein thought philosophy was all about. Both works contain arguments; but their main points are made by observation, not demonstration. What Wittgenstein sought were not deliberate arguments proving this or that proposition but insights. As Mr. McGuinness notes, “the particular excellence of his mind was his capacity for concentration.” He was incessantly looking for das erlösende Wort— the formulation that would solve a particular logical problem but also “the saving word,” the sudden inspiration that would install order and harmony amidst the chaos of his thoughts and feelings. In this sense, for Wittgenstein the conundrums of logic were not abstracted from the perplexities of everyday life and feeling but were the purest, most concentrated expression of them. “Conversion in its various senses,” Mr. McGuinness writes, “is what he wanted in both logic and in life. The fundamental problem in logic had to be solved and he had to become a new person.”

Nowhere is this connection more evident than in the Tractatus. It is an exceedingly odd work, in form as well as content. Wittgenstein organized the book—which comprises a series of brief remarks and observations interspersed with logical formulae—into a series of seven propositions, each of which (except proposition 7, which stands alone and concludes the book) is followed by a series of numbered comments. The format—proposition 1 followed by comments 1.1, 1.11, and so on—gives the book a formidably technical aura. To what extent this appearance of logical structure is supported by the actual flow of argument has been a matter of some dispute since the book first appeared in 1921.

The question of its logical structure notwithstanding, though, the Tractatus is almost universally considered a landmark of twentieth-century philosophy. Russell agreed to write an introduction for the book (an introduction that is generally conceded to have misrepresented Wittgenstein’s thought), and when Wittgenstein later submitted it to be considered as a doctoral dissertation, G. B. Moore is famously said to have reported: “It is my personal opinion that Mr. Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” The German title—Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung—literally means “Logical-Philosophical Treatise.” Verbally, it recalls Spinoza’s “Theologico-Political Treatise,” though what we know of Wittgenstein’s reading makes it unlikely that he had encountered the work, still less likely that he named his own work with Spinoza’s book in mind. It was Moore who proposed the now famous Latin title, and, as is so often the case in these matters, the idiosyncratic yet peculiarly catchy title has contributed greatly to the book’s mystique. So successful has the title been that the book is often known by its Latin title (typically shortened to the Tractatus) even among Germans.

Already the first few propositions give one a good sense of the enigmatic character of the book.

1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts [Tatsachen], not things [Dinge]. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

It is only in the context of the work as a whole that these “oracular” statements (to adopt A. J. Ayer’s characterization) begin to make sense and that it becomes clear that Wittgenstein’s main task in the Tractatus is to establish once and for all the structure and hence the limits of language, to separate what can be expressed in language from what must forever elude linguistic expression. “The whole sense of the book,” Wittgenstein wrote in his preface, “might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” This anticipates the famous concluding line of the book, proposition 7, where Wittgenstein’s exacting prose teeters on the edge of poetry: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen”—“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

It is clear from his correspondence, too, that Wittgenstein attached a great deal of importance to the inexpressible. Writing about the manuscript of the Tractatus to a prospective publisher, Wittgenstein insisted that

my work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that it is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly in place by being silent about it.

The ambition—if ambition it is—to “put everything firmly in place by being silent about it” may be said to be the underlying goal of the Tractatus. But because of Wittgenstein’s reputation as the paterfamilias of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy, it is important to stress that his fundamental aim in the Tractatus was as much ethical as it was logical or linguistic. This is the point of Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (4.112)—specifically, an activity that can clarify our thoughts and thus lead us out of the illusions generated by language. A. J. Ayer illuminated this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought when he suggested that, just as Kant attempted to limit the claims of reason in order to make room for faith, so Wittgenstein undertook to mark off the limits of the sayable in order to preserve the integrity of the unsayable. “There are, indeed,” Wittgenstein writes, “things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (6.522).

Yet despite Wittgenstein’s identification of “things that cannot be put into words” as the “mystical,” it is perhaps not surprising that the dominant analytic tradition of philosophy has interpreted Wittgenstein to mean that what cannot be put into words is nonsense: not so much the “mystical” as the “mystifying.” “For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed,” Wittgenstein wrote in proposition 6.5. “The riddle does not exist.” It is easy to see how such statements could be taken as aid and comfort for the tradition of modern language philosophy, one of whose chief abusive epithets was the word “metaphysical.” In many respects, things were primed to be read that way: the introduction by Russell, the formidably technical nature of the middle passages of the book, its adoption as a kind of catechism by the philosophical positivists that sprang up in Vienna after World War I—all this made it easy to overlook the fact that the last sections of the book, the culmination of Wittgenstein’s argument, were in fact deeply opposed to the anti-metaphysical tendency of positivism. As Stephen Toulmin explains in Wittgenstein’s Vienna,

far from being a positivist, . . . Wittgenstein had meant the Tractatus to be interpreted in exactly the opposite sense. Where the Vienna positivists had equated the “important” with the “Verifiable” and dismissed all unverifiable propositions as “unimportant because unsayable,” the concluding section of the Tractatus had insisted—though to deaf ears—that the unpayable alone has genuine value. . .. Wittgenstein’s silence in the face of the 'unutterable' was not a mocking silence like that of the positivists, but rather a respectful one. Having decided that “Value-neutral” facts alone can be expressed in regular proposition form, he exhorted his readers to turn their eyes away from factual propositions to the things of true value—which cannot be gesagt [stated] but only gezeigt [shown].

I believe Toulmin is correct, though in this context one cannot help remarking the irony that a book that put such stock in clarity of expression should itself invite such radically different interpretations.

It is also worth noting that one of the chief goals of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as expressed in the Tractatus is to render philosophy obsolete. Because (as Wittgenstein puts it in proposition 6.41) “the sense of the world must he outside the world,” philosophy as traditionally conceived—what is sometimes called “first-order” philosophy—is held to be impossible. Instead of attempting to discuss and to illuminate fundamental epistemological, moral, and aesthetic problems, philosophy, according to Wittgenstein’s teaching here, must content itself with demonstrating its own pointlessness. In the penultimate proposition, 6.54, Wittgenstein candidly admits that

my propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

It is in this sense that Wittgenstein could claim, in his preface to the Tractatus, that he considered “the truth of the thoughts” he had set forth to be “unassailable and definitive,” yet then go on to point out “how little is achieved when these problems are solved.”

In other words, in Wittgenstein’s view, philosophy—and by extension rational discourse generally—is helpless when confronted with anything that really matters. Since “propositions can express nothing that is higher” (6.42), and since philosophy must limit itself to what can be expressed in propositions, philosophy turns out to have a purely negative function. It relieves one of the burden of having to think about pseudo-problems—which prominently include almost the entire pantheon of classic philosophical concerns. (“Philosophical problems arise,” Wittgenstein wrote in the Investigations, “when language goes on holiday.”) Philosophy is the ladder one ascends to clarify one’s thinking and thereby dispense with philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s thought changed radically in the years following the publication of the Tractatus. Perhaps the most important change was his abandoning the hope of providing a complete account of the logical structure of language; instead of attempting to establish the limits of language, to construct an ideal language in which all true propositions can be clearly expressed, he turned his attention to the rich variety of ordinary language. As he put it in a telling paragraph near the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations,

It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used . . . with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)

But one thing that remained constant between early and late Wittgenstein, between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, was the view of philosophy as a kind of disease that must be overcome. “The real discovery,” Wittgenstein writes in the Investigations, “is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.” As Mr. McGuinness sums it up at the end of his book, “Philosophy requires logic and logic shows that there can be no philosophy, yet the fact that there can be none turns out to be the greatest liberation.”

In this first volume of his biography, Mr. McGuinness takes us through 1921 and the publication of the Tractatus. Still to come is his account of Wittgenstein’s later life: the renunciation of his great fortune—which he distributed among his siblings so as not to corrupt the poor—his abandonment of philosophy, his six years of teaching schoolchildren in a succession of small villages in the Austrian mountains; his work as an architect, a hotel porter, and as a gardener in a monastery; and the resumption of philosophical work and his return to Cambridge, where he eventually succeeded G. E. Moore as professor of philosophy in 1939.

In many ways, Mr. McGuinness would seem to be the ideal candidate for the task of writing Wittgenstein’s biography. A philosopher himself, he is the translator, with D.F. Pears, of the standard English version of the Tractatus (1961) and is well equipped to deal with the technical aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He ably traces the multifarious influences on Wittgenstein’s thought, from Schopenhauer and Tolstoy to Frege, Russell, and Heinrich Hertz. And he has had the support of the Wittgenstein family and literary heirs, enjoying access to many hitherto un-plumbed papers and recollections. Indeed, given the fierce loyalty of the Wittgenstein coterie to the memory of the master, their cooperation and support mean that this must be regarded as something of an “authorized” biography, with the usual privileges (unrestricted access to material and persons acquainted with the subject) as well as the usual vices (undue reticence and a reluctance to offend) that one has come to expect from such productions. In addition, while Mr. McGuinness is a familiar of the Wittgenstein circle, he has the distinct advantage of not having known his subject. The very power of Wittgenstein’s personality—his knack of overwhelming others emotionally—makes this an asset for anyone undertaking his biography.

But despite these advantages, it must be said that this first volume of Mr. McGuin-ness’s biography, while competent, is a disappointment. There is, it is true, a fair amount of new material presented here; the words “Personal communication” or “Letter in the possession of Wittgenstein’s literary heirs” appear often in Mr. McGuinness’s footnotes; but I am not sure how much revealing new material Mr. McGuinness has unearthed. Readers will encounter fresh details about Wittgenstein’s time in Manchester, his Cambridge friendships, his seclusion in Norway in 1913-1914, his courageous service in the Austrian army during the Great War, and so on. But fresh details do not a biography make. Anyone acquainted with the chief contributions to Wittgensteiniana will find Mr. McGuinness treading very familiar territory. The passages devoted to Wittgenstein in Bertrand Russell’s autobiographical writings, Norman Malcolm’s well-known and compelling memoir of Wittgenstein, published together with a brief but informative biographical sketch by G.H. von Wright, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna, the biographical introductions that stand as a preface to so many books about Wittgenstein’s philosophy (the one included in A.J. Ayer’s recent Wittgenstein is especially lucid)—together, these give a tolerably full portrait of the philosopher’s life and idiosyncrasies.

This is not to say that there was no need for a new biography of Wittgenstein. A work that had synthesized, corrected, and completed our sometimes piecemeal knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and had woven it together with a compelling account of his thought would have been an important intellectual contribution. But Mr. McGuinness has so far managed to avoid doing that—and part of the reason, I suspect, is to be found in the words “volume one.” The multi-volume biography has become a popular but often ill-advised enterprise in the last decade or so. What could have been said elegantly between two covers is stretched and padded to fit between four— or six or eight covers. Sometimes, as in Leon Edel’s panoramic biography of Henry James, the effort is justified. But all too often the subject or the biographer—or both—fail to merit such lavish attention. Michael Holroyd’s tumid, two-volume biography of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge acquaintance Lytton Strachey is perhaps the epitome of the “big” biography that swamps its subject and, inevitably, the reader’s interest. The first volume of Mr. McGuinness’s biography runs to over three hundred pages; presumably the second volume will weigh in similarly. But how much better it would have been to have had a single, four-hundred-page book that gave us in one volume an authoritative overview of Wittgenstein’s fife and work) Few readers would feel cheated by not having Wittgenstein’s years in Manchester or his stint in the army or his experience as a prisoner of war recounted in such meticulous detail-especially when the account is as impersonal and “external” as Mr. McGuinness’s account tends to be.

Indeed, another reason that Mr. McGuinness has failed to produce as good a biography as one might have hoped is that he has been too restrained and discreet about inquiring into the personality—as distinct from the thoughts and itinerary—of his subject. In the wake of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s appalling exposé of Picasso, restraint and discretion must more than ever appear as prime virtues in a biographer. But in his passion for discretion—enjoined, perhaps, by Wittgenstein’s friends and heirs—Mr. McGuinness threatens to let Wittgenstein the man slip through his fingers. Was Wittgenstein ever in love? It says something about the hmitations of Mr. McGuinness’s biography that one cannot really answer this question on the basis of the evidence he presents.

Then, too, while we must be grateful that Mr. McGuinness did not feel compelled to dwell on Wittgenstein’s sex life, it is a pity that he did not do more to acquaint us with the philosopher’s intimate personal relations. In his notorious 1975 book, Wittgenstein, William Warren Bartley III portentously confides that in addition to engaging in the usual sorts of biographical research he went “to homosexual bars in Vienna and London in search of those who knew Wittgenstein in another way; and I was successful.” He also claims that as a young man Wittgenstein was “given to bouts of extravagant and almost uncontrollable promiscuity” that would take him out to the streets in search of anonymous homosexual encounters. Since Mr. Bartley presents no evidence for these claims, the reader is left to accept them on faith—or to reject them, as most commentators on Wittgenstein have done. But in a full-scale biography of the sort Mr. McGuinness has undertaken, one expects some discussion of these matters, certainly more than the single reference dismissing Mr. Bartley’s conjectures as “gratuitous.”

This is all the more the case because, at bottom, Mr. McGuinness is probably right in thinking that the primary passions of Wittgenstein’s life are to be found in his struggles with himself. The essential thing to grasp about Wittgenstein’s character is his peculiar combination of tenacity and touchiness. Both are evident in all aspects of his life: intellectual, social, emotional. Craving affection, he nonetheless could not bear prolonged intimacy. This is the point of his fondness for Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines, to which Mr. McGuinness frequently adverts: crowding together for warmth on a winter’s day, a group of porcupines are pricked by one another’s quills; so they move back and forth until they find a middle distance—a place midway between isolation and intimacy—that they can comfortably endure.

Understandably, Wittgenstein’s extreme fastidiousness, ruthless honesty, and readiness to take offense at the slightest demurral made him a most demanding friend. His letters are full of both protestations of affection and detailed explanations about why he must terminate relations with his correspondent. As Mr. McGuinness observes, “though he often asked, in a material sense, very little, he demanded that his individuality should be recognized. Exception must be made for it, rules must be circumvented. The world must be remade to fit his gifts. It was the only way he could make use of them.”

But Wittgenstein’s touchiness was nothing compared to his honesty and passionate love of the truth. Despite his sometimes forbidding use of language and the assimilation of his thought and intellectual mannerisms into academic linguistic philosophy, Wittgenstein is at bottom an exceedingly unacademic character. Norman Malcolm and others report that he habitually tried to persuade students to give up their plans to teach philosophy because, as Malcolm put it, “he believed that a normal human being could not be a university teacher and also an honest and serious person.” It is in fact a curious irony that this man who detested the academy and was convinced that being a professor of philosophy was “a kind of living death” should have spawned one of the largest academic cottage industries of our time. Wittgenstein’s position on professional philosophy is perhaps best summed up in a letter he wrote in 1944: “What is the use of philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life.” It remains an open question whether Wittgenstein’s own philosophy really helps to improve one’s thinking about “the important questions of everyday life.” There can be little doubt, however, that his life was a heroic struggle to bring philosophy back to the “important questions"—even if it turned out that philosophy itself had to be sacrificed along the way.

Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig 1889-1921, by Brian McGuinness; University of California Press, 322 pages, $22.50. Go back to the text.