'Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving yourself.'Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889, the eighth and youngest child of one of the wealthiest families in Hapsburg Vienna. The father's immense wealth as a leading figure in the iron and steel industry, known as "The Carnegie of Austria", enabled the family to live in the style of the aristocracy. Their home in Vienna was known as the Palais Wittgenstein. In addition, they had a house on the Outskirts of Vienna and a large estate in the country.
he Wittgensteins were at the centre of the cultural life of fin de siecle Vienna. It was the birthplace of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), of atonal music (Arnold Schoenberg), modern functional architecture (Adolf Loos) and the birthplace of Zionism (Theodor Herzl). But it was also the birthplace of Nazism (Adolf Hitler). Three out of Ludwig's four brothers were to commit suicide.
He was brought up in a house of music. There were seven grand pianos in his childhood home. The composers Brahms and Mahler were frequent visitors to the musical evenings, and young Pablo Casals played there. There were also works of art by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Rodin.
At the age of fourteen, he was sent to a rather unacademic school at Linz. Adolf Hitler, who was almost exactly the same age as Ludwig, was also there. When he was seventeen and a half, he went to study mechanical engineering in Berlin and in 1908 he moved to Manchester as a Research student in Engineering. During this time, he got involved in the study of the foundations of mathematics and this proved to be a fateful move that led him to philosophy.
He was soon writing a book on the foundations of logic and mathematics. He showed it to Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) the great German philosopher-mathematician who suggested Wittgenstein go to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell.
So Wittgenstein went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study under Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who was a lecturer in mathematical logic. This was to lead to a passionate intellectual friendship between these two great philosophers in which both were transformed.
For Russell, Wittgenstein 'was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and domineering'. He would visit Russell at midnight, pace up and down like a wild beast for hours in agitated silence, wrestling with problems of logic and with his sins.
In 1913, Wittgenstein decided to live for two years in Norway on his own to meditate and work on logic, without completing his degree.
Soon after the 1914-18 war broke out, Wittgenstein joined the Austrian army as a volunteer gunner and was sent to the Eastern Front. At the end of the war, the Italians made him and 300,000 Austrian troops prisoners, and 30,000 were to die in captivity of disease and starvation. By this point he has finished the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the culmination of his thoughts on logic and ethics. Several publishers, including his own university press, Cambridge, rejected it. It at last got published but he was paid nothing for the rights of the book and wasn't entitled to royalties from its sales. It soon became a classic.
The Tractatus, a classic of 20th century philosophy, is a short book, about 70 pages, consisting of remarks on the essence of language, the nature of the world, of logic, mathematics, science and philosophy, and ending with comments on ethics, religion and mysticism. It is written with logical precision and often poetic intensity.
After the war, Wittgenstein found himself one of the wealthiest men in Austria due to his father's astuteness in putting the family's wealth in American bonds. But Ludwig gave it all to his brothers and sisters and trained as an elementary school teacher. He felt the Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy. Yet in 1926, he gave up teaching.
Slowly, he began to see the Tractatus as flawed and in 1929 he returned to Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Trinity College (the Tractatus was put forward for a Ph.D.).
In 1947, he resigned from his professorship at Cambridge because he wanted to write and because he felt his teaching did not have a good effect. So he went to live in Ireland, away from the "disintegrating and putrefying English civilization". Much of the time he lived in a little cottage on the west coast of Ireland at the mouth of the Killary harbour. There he wrote some of his most important work.
Soon after a trip to America in 1849, he became ill and returned to England, diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the prostrate. The last two years of his life were spent between Vienna, Oxford and Cambridge, staying with family and friends. He continued to significant work in philosophy until the day before he finally lost consciousness. He died at Cambridge in April in 1951.
There are some 20 titles of writings by Wittgenstein in English, but only the Tractatus and two short pieces were actually published with his approval. The majority are remarks extracted from his notebooks by various editors; some of his lectures and conversations are put together from the notes by his students, and some letters - all of course published after his death.
He constantly changed his text, reformulating his remarks, putting them in different contexts to their meaning. When he reached a conclusion he would often start all over again, re-exploring the topic from a different point of view. It was as if he wanted to keep everything in flux, to show work in progress rather than grand philosophical conclusions.
His best-known book is the Philosophical Investigations which was published two years after his death. The first two thirds of the remarks were chosen and put in order by him.