Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( VIT-gən-s(h)tyne; Austrian German: [ˈluːdvɪk ˈjoːsɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtɡn̩ʃtaɪn]; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austro-British philosopher who worked in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
Wittgenstein was born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families. From 1911 to 1913, he studied at the University of Cambridge under Bertrand Russell and interacted closely with John Maynard Keynes and G. E. Moore, among others. During this time, he inherited a fortune, part of which he donated to various poets and artists. He also began what would become his first important philosophical work. However, at the start of World War I, he left academia to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After a series of personal adversities—including the death of his older brother by suicide (the third of his older brothers to die by suicide during his lifetime), the death of his close friend and lover David Pinsent, and his imprisonment in an Italian prisoner of war camp—he became depressed, and he gave away his remaining fortune to his siblings. He worked as a schoolteacher around Vienna. Despite these setbacks, his philosophical work was published in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, followed by an English translation in 1922 with help from Frank P. Ramsey, to considerable discussion and acclaim.
At the encouragement of Russell, Keynes, and Ramsey, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, where he taught from 1930 to 1947, giving lectures on philosophy, often permeated by his original research. During World War II, he left academia again to work at the Guy's Hospital in London and at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne. Wittgenstein would not publish another philosophical work during his lifetime, but following his death in 1951, his voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations.
Wittgenstein's philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and a later period, articulated primarily in the Philosophical Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language game.
Wittgenstein was well regarded among academics during his lifetime, and was decorated for his courage during World War I. However, he encountered controversy during his time teaching for his use of violent corporal punishment on girls and boys (see the Haidbauer incident). His work (both early and later) has been described as controversial and sparked a number of different reactions. Later philosophers and commentators have generally agreed that he is one of the most important figures in 20th-century philosophy.
According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after World War II, Wittgenstein's paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, an Ashkenazi Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. In July 1808, Napoleon issued a decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname, so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein. His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein — who took the middle name "Christian" to distance himself from his Jewish background — married Fanny Figdor, also Jewish, who converted to Protestantism just before they married, and the couple founded a successful business trading in wool in Leipzig. Ludwig's grandmother Fanny was a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim.
They had 11 children – among them Wittgenstein's father. Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847–1913) became an industrial tycoon, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in Europe, with an effective monopoly on Austria's steel cartel. Thanks to Karl, the Wittgensteins became the second wealthiest family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, only the Rothschilds being wealthier. Karl Wittgenstein was viewed as the Austrian equivalent of Andrew Carnegie, with whom he was friends, and was one of the wealthiest men in the world by the 1890s. As a result of his decision in 1898 to invest substantially in the Netherlands and in Switzerland as well as overseas, particularly in the US, the family was to an extent shielded from the hyperinflation that hit Austria in 1922. However, their wealth diminished due to post-1918 hyperinflation and subsequently during the Great Depression, although even as late as 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.
Wittgenstein was ethnically Jewish. His mother was Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known among friends as "Poldi". Her father was a Bohemian Jew, and her mother was an Austrian-Slovene Catholic—she was Wittgenstein's only non-Jewish grandparent. Poldi was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on his maternal side. Wittgenstein was born at 8:30 pm on 26 April 1889 in the "Villa Wittgenstein" at what became Neuwaldegger Straße 38 in the suburban parish Neuwaldegg outside Vienna.
Karl and Poldi had nine children in all—four girls: Hermine, Margaret (Gretl), Helene, and a fourth daughter Dora who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), Paul—who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in World War I—and Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family.
Wittgenstein and his siblings were brought up in the Roman Catholic faith of their mother. The family was at the centre of Vienna's cultural life; Bruno Walter described the life at the Wittgensteins' palace as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture". Karl was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and financing the city's exhibition hall and art gallery, the Secession Building. Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Wittgenstein's sister Margaret for her wedding, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family's numerous music rooms. According to John King, Wittgenstein "was always immaculately neat and tidy, small of stature and with piercing blue eyes under a shock of curly hair."
Wittgenstein, who valued precision and discipline, never considered contemporary classical music acceptable. He said to his friend Drury in 1930: Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself had absolute pitch, and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life; he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and he was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. He was known as a amazing whistler, a talent he developed as a boy while his brothers played instruments as children. Wittgenstein would give tips to other whistlers if they were off tune. He learnt to play the clarinet in his 30s. A fragment of music (three bars), composed by Wittgenstein, was discovered in one of his 1931 notebooks, by Michael Nedo, director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge.
Family temperament and brothers' suicides
Ray Monk writes that Karl's aim was to turn his sons into captains of industry; they were not sent to school lest they acquire bad habits but were educated at home to prepare them for work in Karl's industrial empire. Three of the five brothers later committed suicide. Psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Johannes Brahms said of the family, whom he visited regularly: They seemed to act towards one another as if they were at court.The family appeared to have a strong streak of depression running through it. Anthony Gottlieb tells a story about Paul practising on one of the pianos in the Wittgensteins' main family mansion, 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!