That aim, to reveal the order behind the disorder, survives the war. The original project seems to have been one that Russell initiated-to show that behind the messy outward “clothing” of language lies a lean body of thought, austere and simple. Along the way, his manuscript on logic is transformed almost beyond recognition. He repeatedly volunteers for the most dangerous posting available to him.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN FREE
In his free moments as a soldier, he scribbles in notebooks that are divided between remarks destined for an ambitious philosophical manuscript and personal remarks on religion, masturbation, and the quotidian business of being at war. Neither before nor after the war does he show much interest in workaday politics. The war and soldiering evidently mean something to him, but nothing about his decision is obvious. He enlists in the Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire despite being eligible for a medical exemption, and serves as an ordinary soldier even though someone of his class could have joined as an officer. But that plan is interrupted by the First World War. On the verge of a radical breakthrough, he decides to live alone in rural Norway, to think about logic in absolute solitude. He quickly shows talent enough to convince Russell that he is no charlatan, and charisma enough to convince Russell that, even if he were, acquaintance might be worth the bother. He hates the social world of Cambridge, with its gossipy gays and sardonic dons. He is rude and a bit arrogant but in another way without vanity. He is evidently a tormented soul, and he makes little effort to be liked. A young man from a fabulously wealthy and cultivated Viennese family arrives in Cambridge, in 1911, to study with Bertrand Russell, the preëminent logician of his age. How many people in the history of philosophy are the subject of a two-volume tome of anecdotes? What explains the fascination with the ephemera of one man’s life, including among people who claim that the work was the thing?Įven for those who know the facts of that life well, “the difficulty has been to discern in them an intelligible human being,” as a reviewer of Ray Monk’s definitive biography, “ Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,” from 1990, wrote. Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, in that seemingly everybody who met him felt moved to record the encounter. But he has not been afforded the cloak of impersonality that shrouds most analytic philosophers. He was one of the founders of a tradition-the “analytic”-that has come to dominate academic philosophy in much of the world. There is only one canonical philosopher of the twentieth century with anything resembling these traits: Ludwig Wittgenstein. What was it like to be in the presence of someone who believed such things? The just man is happier than the unjust man, even when he is being tortured on the rack. It is worse to do wrong than to be wronged. No one can really desire what’s bad, he said. He was also queer in how he managed to combine rationality with the most abject unreasonableness.
The Greek word often applied to him was atopos, literally, “out of place.” His out-of-placeness consisted in what the scholar Martha Nussbaum has called a “deeper impenetrability of spirit.” Socrates simply could not be counted on to say what one expected him to say.
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