Maybe it's a little too in-depth, but I guess someone had to write the definitive biography of Wittgenstein. I read this without having read any of W's books, only having a general idea of what he was interested in and wrote about. So some details felt tedious, like the plot of W's favorite detective novel. But I guess it's my fault for wanting to read every page of this.

LW himself was truly fascinating and eccentric. He constantly doubted the value of philosophy and even advised his students to leave academia and take up work as mechanics or doctors. And yet, he continued to be completely obsessed with analyzing and writing about philosophical problems. Similarly, I sometimes questioned the value of reading this book or trying to understand what W was getting at. I wonder if Wittgenstein's mission to free the mind from philosophical quandaries, that is, "letting the fly out of the fly bottle," doesn't actually just add fuel to the already confusing fire. But then again, maybe being in the fly bottle isn't so bad in some cases.

I dogeared many pages that contained fascinating insights and hilarious anecdotes. One of my favorites is on page 555, where W is admiring the moon: "If I had planned it, I should never have made the sun at all. See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot... And if there were only the moon there would be no reading or writing." He was truly nuts.

This biography offers a unique look into the mind of a complex and brilliant thinker, and while it may not be for everyone, it definitely provides food for thought.

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Everyone who has even the slightest interest in philosophy and/or Wittgenstein should read this book.

Philosophy is a vast and profound field that has intrigued thinkers throughout the ages. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular, is a highly influential philosopher whose ideas have had a significant impact on various branches of philosophy.

This book offers valuable insights into Wittgenstein's thoughts and theories. It explores his unique approach to language, logic, and the nature of reality. By reading this book, you will gain a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy and its relevance in today's world.

Whether you are a philosophy student, a casual reader interested in expanding your knowledge, or someone who simply wants to explore new ideas, this book is a must-read. It will challenge your thinking, inspire new perspectives, and leave you with a greater appreciation for the power of philosophy.

A truly marvelous and highly engaging book awaits the readers. In part, it is because Wittgenstein is such an odd and fascinating character. His idiosyncrasies and unique personality traits draw us in and make us eager to know more about him. But mostly, the book owes its charm to the fact that Monk finds an excellent balance between the life and the ideas of this tortured genius. He skillfully weaves together the events of Wittgenstein's life with his profound philosophical musings, presenting a comprehensive and nuanced picture. What's more, Monk writes it all with such sensitivity. He approaches Wittgenstein's life and work with a deep understanding and respect, allowing us to feel the emotions and struggles that this remarkable thinker endured. The result is a book that not only informs but also touches the heart and mind.

A rather good biography.

After reading this biography, one is not the same. I think in a certain sense, Wittgenstein is quite Kantian. I hope to be able to read it again soon because I think this book will accompany me in the next few years: because logic and ethics are the same, the duty to oneself. May God give me the strength to be sincere with myself.

This biography offers profound insights into Wittgenstein's thoughts and ideas. It makes one reflect on the relationship between logic and ethics, and how they both pertain to our inner selves.

By delving into his works and life, we can gain a better understanding of his unique perspective.

Re-reading this biography will no doubt provide further enlightenment and inspiration, guiding us on our own journey of self-discovery and moral growth.

It is a book that has the potential to have a lasting impact on our lives, and I look forward to exploring it again in the future.

Ray Monk's outstanding biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a comprehensive portrayal of the intense, ascetic, and conscience-ridden philosopher throughout the various phases of his arduous life, from childhood to death.

Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe. He initially pursued higher studies as an engineer but eventually became perhaps the most highly regarded philosopher of the first half of the 20th century.

His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus brought him early fame, yet he was never comfortable with it and ultimately disavowed the work. Bertrand Russell, his best-known supporter, helped him establish himself at Cambridge. However, like many others close to Wittgenstein, Russell ultimately gave up on him. As Monk makes evident, Wittgenstein was uncompromising, harsh, and exhausting. He frequently fled from and to Cambridge, sometimes lectured by shouting and at other times maintained silence. He ultimately adopted a philosophical style that was at odds with convention. If Socrates was a self-described gadfly, then Wittgenstein was an inveterate nuisance to himself and others. He could outargue anyone, not so much because he enjoyed it but rather because he felt obliged to do so.

In Monk's view, Wittgenstein's philosophizing was a restless and relentless attempt to discredit or overturn the scientific/technological culture that was overwhelming Europe and the United States. He mistrusted theories and generalizations. He bullied himself and others into finding ways to think logically and live ethically. He advocated for a slower pace of life and a disbelief in Progress.

The pity of this biography and Wittgenstein's life, it seems to me, is that despite the vast amount of documentation Monk incorporates into the narrative, we still lack a clear picture of the man in action. Like Coleridge, he was a voluble and brilliant talker, more prolific in person than in print. After the Tractatus, he spent years fiddling with new work that he could not bring himself to complete. He did leave a substantial cache of manuscripts and typescripts that have been published posthumously, but like the Tractatus—and unlike Wittgenstein the man—these texts are enigmatic provocations that emphasize the importance of context in interpreting words and events while shunning their own context. They are brief, brilliant, anti-systematic outbursts that lack the impact of Wittgenstein's facial expressions, his tones of voice, his abruptness, dismissiveness, and philosophical persona.

People were unsure how to deal with him. He was recognized as a great philosopher, yet he was not overly interested in the work of his predecessors. He would philosophize about psychology or mathematics without spending much time discussing the actual subjects. He was interested in how we should think about psychology and mathematics... and how psychology and mathematics should think about themselves.

Despite his fame, he famously took on roles like becoming a factotum at a London hospital during WWII when he could easily have remained at Cambridge as a professor of philosophy. (He also famously gave away the fortune he inherited from his father, transforming himself from one of the richest men in Europe to one of the poorest.)

Monk dedicates a significant amount of time to Wittgenstein's romantic relationships, particularly with one woman and many men. Some, but far from all, of these relationships remained unconsummated. Wittgenstein was so self-punishing and self-critical that one wonders if he was deeply conflicted about his predominantly homosexual preferences. However, in an interesting appendix, Monk essentially refutes this notion, addressing sexual identity questions more directly than in the main text. Withholding some of these comments for so long may not be the most effective way to present them.

Ironically, most of us who might find Wittgenstein fascinating would have the opposite effect on him. This biography provides a good means of circumventing the perils of his immediate personality, but I still wish I could have seen him in action.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely regarded as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century.

I've never read his first and most renowned work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, I have some knowledge of its impact through a course on the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle was an inter-war group of European philosophers who left an indelible mark on modern theorizing regarding science and language.

Wittgenstein also appears as a peripheral character in Logicomix, a wonderful graphic novel about the intersection between mathematics and philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, which I reviewed here. My recent re-reading of Logicomix inspired me to learn more about Wittgenstein himself. Monk's authoritative biography seemed like the perfect place to start.

I was not disappointed. Monk vividly portrays Wittgenstein as both an individual and a philosopher. Balancing the cultural and historical background of a person's era with the personal and emotional aspects of their psyche and linking it to an understanding of how they create or do something worthy of a biography is a challenge for any biographer. Monk accomplishes this expertly, which is no small feat considering how complex all three aspects are for Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into a large Viennese family. His father was a wealthy industrialist, and the Wittgenstein fortune (from which Ludwig ultimately disowned his share of the inheritance) provides his initial and immediate background. Two of his older brothers committed suicide, and Wittgenstein himself struggled with emotional turmoil throughout his life. Being wealthy in Vienna before the Great War (and after, due to his father's expert handling of money) came with a certain cultural heritage. Wittgenstein was very much a child of the twilight of the Romantic era.

But "the duty of genius," as Monk appropriately subtitles his work, is evident in Wittgenstein's life from the start. He constantly pushed beyond the comfortable life his background could have afforded him. Throughout the book (and thus throughout Wittgenstein's life), Monk portrays him as having a painful intellectual honesty. This drove Wittgenstein to study the foundations of mathematics in Cambridge with Bertrand Russell, but it ultimately led him to try to experience life fully. Pure philosophizing was never enough. When the Great War broke out, Wittgenstein enlisted as a common soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was here, in the midst of a true existential crisis - both for him personally, posted alone on night duty in combat operations, and for Europe as a whole as the empire in which his home was the capital crumbled - that he composed his Tractatus.

Although I haven't read it yet, Monk skillfully weaves the second important thread of his narrative - what Wittgenstein was actually doing in philosophy - so that even the general reader can get some insights into why this was significant. Theorizing was not enough for Wittgenstein. Experience and language were central to his philosophizing. The true meaning of the world, Wittgenstein wrote, would never be expressed in the world itself. The meaning of the system was somehow beyond the system, something that philosophy alone could never touch. Monk also shows how the background of Wittgenstein's religious beliefs played out against this. Ironically, it was this realization, that there were things on which we must remain silent, things that philosophy could never address, that was misinterpreted by the Vienna Circle.

Immediately after the war, Wittgenstein trained to be a primary school teacher and attempted to live out his philosophy by teaching students in the rural Austrian Alps. This was unsuccessful, and after that, he traveled between his home in Vienna, a cabin in Norway, and Cambridge, ultimately returning there to lecture in philosophy, although he was never comfortable in the academic setting. Monk takes what could have been a rather tedious narrative and keeps the character of Wittgenstein alive: the wandering, tortured, emotionally isolated yet intensely emotional philosopher who teaches philosophy eccentrically, criticizing the philosophical establishment the entire time. After Germany absorbed Austria and the Second World War broke out, he was quite literally a man without a homeland (and here Monk offers perceptive comments on Wittgenstein's Jewish ancestry and how this affected him personally). Wittgenstein spent the remainder of his life boarding with various friends, admirers, and former students, writing, editing, and rewriting (but never publishing) his later philosophical works.

An easy response to a biography like this is to ask, so what exactly did Wittgenstein do? What happened to him? Why is this book over 500 pages long? And in some ways, the answer is simple: he didn't do much. He thought and wrote. He lived and tried to love. He wrote angst-ridden letters, which provide Monk with much of his source material, complemented by interviews with many of the surviving characters in this story. And yet, Wittgenstein changed the climate of philosophical thought itself. He trained philosophers to ask questions honestly, to try to understand what they were doing, and then he encouraged them to seek useful employment as doctors or laborers. He tried to do this himself but always returned to writing. He was certain he would be misunderstood, and he often was.

I don't know enough about Wittgenstein to know if Monk has misunderstood him. But I feel that - as with Hankins' excellent biography of William Rowan Hamilton - Monk has explained - or rather, has presented for examination - what most of us can only hope for: the combination of a life lived with thoughts thought. Wittgenstein is remembered for his thoughts, for what he wrote about the nature of philosophy, truth, language, and perception. But as Monk has expertly shown, these thoughts emerged from a life filled with a great deal of pain, loneliness, discouragement, frustration, and (perhaps contributing to much of the above) a relentless drive to be intellectually honest. To think and speak clearly, as Wittgenstein attempted, is often the most difficult task of all. To write an account of someone who tried to live doing just that is also extremely difficult, but Monk has succeeded here with care and a great deal of pathos.

This is quite long but very readable and often entertaining. Wittgenstein, a recognized genius, had a scandalously limited interest in reading other philosophers. He simply walked into the subject at the deep end without much preamble. This led to some very idiosyncratic ideas and indeed convictions, which Monk attributes to his early reading. By any standard, his early reading was at best suspect. His ideas evolved over his lifetime, and he came to reject many of his earlier rather dogmatic assertions. He combined perfectionism with indecision. Everything was permanently capable of revision, and he was constitutionally incapable of drawing a line. As a result, much of his writing was only made available posthumously and was assembled by his executors. Wittgenstein himself believed that his biography had no bearing on his ideas, but Monk does an excellent job of proving him wrong. In fact, it makes a lot more sense to recognize the way his ideas developed. There is no reason to take anything as scriptural or definitive. Instead, it should always be taken as an invitation to the reader to take up the same problems and work on them.

Ronald Jonkers has translated the thick book excellently, with all the details.

This helps me to get through it, even though I find it a bit too detailed, with countless quotes from letters.

But I remain fascinated by the eventful life of this special man.

Wittgenstein moved frequently: he lived in Austria, England, Norway, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

He sought out secluded places to be able to work well.

But he found peace nowhere and always kept fussing over whether he was a good person and whether his life had meaning.

Despite various friendships, he often felt misunderstood and alone.

And yet he said on his deathbed: tell my friends that I have had a wonderful life.

https://lalageleest.nl/2020/06/14/lud...

I'm not going to have any available time in the upcoming couple of weeks to pen down something truly proper regarding this remarkable book and this incredibly intriguing, captivating, gloriously flawed yet brilliant man, Wittgenstein. Therefore, I'll direct your attention to Jimmy's review of this book. His review was what initially sparked my interest in it and is filled with a wealth of great information about Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Vienna, writer's block, and a myriad of other fascinating things. Jimmy is truly a gem on Goodreads. So, do give his wonderful review the many well-deserved votes it merits:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

pg 17

Kraus's lofty reply was, 'If I must choose the lesser of two evils, I will choose neither.' He said that politics is what a man does to conceal what he is and what he himself does not know. This phrase shows one of the ways Wittgenstein's outlook as an adult corresponds to Kraus's. Wittgenstein later told many of his friends, 'Just improve yourself. That is all you can do to improve the world.' For him, political questions were always secondary to questions of personal integrity. The question he asked himself at eight was answered by a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: one should be truthful, and that's it. The question 'Why?' is inappropriate and unanswerable. Instead, all other questions must be asked and answered within this fixed point - the inviolable duty to be true to oneself.

pg 18

The term 'noumenal-ontic' means possessing the character of real rather than phenomenal existence.

pg 26

Hertz proposed dealing with the problem of 'What is force?' by restating Newtonian physics without using 'force' as a basic concept. He wrote that when the painful contradictions are removed, the question about the nature of force won't be answered, but our minds, no longer vexed, will stop asking illegitimate questions.

pg 43

His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He said he starts his work with hope every morning and ends in despair every evening. He has the same kind of rage when he can't understand things as I do.

pg 45

He believed that one should be - like his father, his brother Hans, and all geniuses - a creature of impulse.

pg 51

'What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and lose his own soul?' He then said how few people don't lose their soul. I said it depended on having a large purpose that one is true to. He said he thought it depended more on suffering and the power to endure it. I was surprised as I hadn't expected that from him.

pg 92

In philosophy, there are no deductions; it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. It can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics, with logic as its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.

pg 129

Almost against his will, he was led to the conclusion that there was such an order. The world, as he told Russell, consists of facts, not things. That is, it consists of things (objects) in certain relations. These facts are mirrored by the relations between the symbols of a proposition. But if language is analysable into atomic propositions, then there must be atomic facts corresponding to them. Atomic facts are relations between simple objects.

pg 156

[On the Tractatus] What can be said at all can be said clearly, and where one cannot speak, one must be silent. Central to the book is the distinction between showing and saying. It's the key to understanding the superfluity of the Theory of Types in logic and the inexpressibility of ethical truths. What the Theory of Types tries to say can only be shown by a correct symbolism, and what one wants to say about ethics can only be shown by contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. The last sentence expresses both a logico-philosophical truth and an ethical precept.

pg 164

The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions (i.e., by language) and what can't be expressed but only shown. This, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.

pg 175

'The world is everything that is the case', and 'The world is the totality of facts', Wittgenstein wrote. 'The sense of both propositions is one and the same, but not the ideas I associated with them when I wrote them.'

pg 178

I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: the one here and everything I haven't written. The second part is the important one. The Ethical is delimited from within by my book. I'm convinced it can only be delimited this way. In brief, I think all that which many are babbling today, I've defined in my book by remaining silent about it.

pg 250

According to Brouwer, the mathematician is a creator, not a discoverer. Mathematics is a construction of the human mind, not a body of facts. Wittgenstein agreed with these points, and his later work developed these thoughts into an area far from the logical atomism of the Tractatus.

pg 277

My whole tendency and that of all men who tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This is hopeless. Ethics, as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, etc., can't be a science. What it says doesn't add to our knowledge. But it's a document of a tendency in the human mind that I deeply respect and wouldn't ridicule.

pg 295

Godel's 1st and 2nd Incompleteness Theorems state: (1) within any consistent formal system, there's a sentence that can't be proved true or false; (2) the consistency of a formal system of arithmetic can't be proved within that system. The first is widely believed to show that Russell's ambition in Principia Mathematica is unrealizable.

pg 298

What we find in philosophy is trivial. It doesn't teach new facts like science. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is very difficult and has great importance. Philosophy is the synopsis of trivialities. In philosophy, we're not building a house like the scientist. We're just 'tidying up a room.'

pg 366

What gets in the way of genuine understanding is often pride. 'The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.' Self-scrutiny is necessary to be a decent person and write decent philosophy. 'If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because it's too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing'.

pg 533

Wittgenstein's remark that philosophy 'leaves everything as it is' is often quoted. But it's less often realized that, in changing the way we look at things, he was trying to change everything. His pessimism about his work's effectiveness is related to his belief that the way we look at things is determined by our culture and upbringing, not our philosophical beliefs.

pg 548

'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.'

I could never have imagined how much this book would accompany me and how much its reading could affect me. I don't feel capable of saying everything I think and feel about this work, everything I have thought and felt during this time.

I can only be deeply grateful and excited for everything that has led me to read it, for everything that has happened to me while reading it, for everything that this book (its pages, its post-its, its comments, its underlines) has stirred in me. I can only feel that my attitude towards life, thought, language, and the world has changed.

Perhaps I haven't managed to see the world correctly, perhaps my will doesn't fully conform to the totality of the facts, but I feel within me the impulse to be more honest. It saddens me not to be able to say everything, because the world is independent of my will and there are things about which I must remain silent, but I will strive against the limits of language: I pray that God reunites us again.