Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk (PDF)

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Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk’s life of Wittgenstein is such a one.—The Christian Science Monitor.

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Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly According to Monk, philosopher and reluctant Cambridge don Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was driven by spiritual as much by intellectual concerns, exchanged academia for solitude whenever possible and was drawn to brilliant younger men. “Monk has done an excellent job of elucidating the twin journeys of an extraordinary mind and soul,” said PW. Photos. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Ray Monk is the author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, for which he was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is also the author of Robert Oppenheimer and a two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton.

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⭐A 20th century original, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent much of his adult life as a Cambridge don in England while apparently hating it! A troubled, if brilliant, man he first became fascinated by the technical philosophical work of Bertrand Russell in his youth while studying to be an engineer in England. After an initially awkward first interview with Russell, the dean of logical analysis became convinced that “his German” (he was in fact Austrian, as Russell subsequently determined) had the stuff of genius and might well be the answer to his needs. Russell had become convinced that he’d made all the progress he would ever make on the technical side of philosophy and had so exhausted himself that he needed to find and nurture a younger acolyte with the energy to carry on and take “the next big step.”Russell soon concluded Wittgenstein was his man and became the young Austrian’s mentor. Wittgenstein plunged into the work with his usual focus, though he could not bring himself to publish until he had it right, much to Russell’s dismay. World War I found Wittgenstein back in his family home in Vienna (where his kin, members of an extremely wealthy industrialist family of German-Jewish descent, though Catholic in upbringing and commitment, were prominent). Volunteering for service in the Austrian army, Wittgenstein found life as a soldier, among average people, intolerable and volunteered for the front to test his mettle. There, he placed himself in harm’s way, impressing his superiors and ended up a prisoner of the Italians.During this time he committed his thoughts to a small book which he shared by mail with Russell: the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, destined to become a classic though he had a great deal of trouble getting it published initially. After the war and publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein left philosophy for a career as a grammar school teacher in a rural part of post-World War I Austria. He seems to have been a good teacher, if overly demanding and given to corporal punishment of his charges, something he came to regret in later life. After one particularly eggregious incident, he fled Austria’s school system and returned to Cambridge to do philosophy again.During his period as a grade school teacher, his Tractatus made the rounds of professional philosophers in Cambridge and in Austria (where it fascinated the nascent movement of logical positivists, who sought to establish a philosophical method entirely consistent with science and free of the taint of old philosophy’s metaphysics). Though Wittgenstein became something of a guiding light for these “Vienna Circle” positivists, his concerns were never quite consonant with theirs.Back in Cambridge, he took up his teaching duties again, as assistant instructor and, later, professor of philosophy, but could never bring himself to publish another work, though he worked on many manuscripts and much of what he thought and wrote was circulated in notebook, and other more or less unpublished, forms. During this time he began to question what he had done in the Tractatus, a book he had once thought answered all the questions that could be answered. As he wrestled with his old ideas he gradually came to discard them, much to the chagrin of Russell who could not fathom the odd turn Wittgenstein’s thought had taken which seemed to deny everything Russell found important and worth troubling over. The two men grew apart. While admiring Wittgenstein’s ability to think deeply and with originality, Russell came to conclude that Wittgenstein’s philosophy had gone wrong. More telling, though, is that Russell’s own way of doing philosophy, so-called logicism, gradually fell out of favour as young philosophers came under the Wittgensteinian spell.A charismatic if irascible man, the expatriate don continued, after his return to Cambridge, to work through his revolutionary ideas about the nature of logic and knowing itself, and what it really meant to do philosophy. Discarding the old logicist notions he’d held in the Tractatus, he revised his way of understanding the world. If, in the Tractatus, he’d supposed that language somehow mirrored the world and that this could be seen but not explicitly discussed, he now came to hold that language did not so much reflect what was in the world as construct it. His new view suggested that language was more like a tool box than a camera or mirror and that we built our world by applying its tools in their proper places.The way to understand things was to look deeply into the uses of language itself which, in their ordinary form, were more basic and substantial than the logical forms which had been the stuff of Russellian analysis. For the later Wittgenstein, the key was to stop thinking about abstractions and to return, instead, to the concrete. Philosophical problems were largely puzzles or confusions which needed not to be solved, as with scientific problems, but, rather, dissolved. Philosophy became, on his view, a personal search for understanding and not a process of building systems to compete with scientific theorizing. His focus and interests ranged from the foundations of mathematics (he denied the logicist basis Russell had aimed to construct) to the arts and ethical matters (how must a man live?) though he doesn’t seem to have contributed anything explicit in this last area.Philosophy became, in his view, the search for insight, for new ways of seeing, and the abandonment of system-building and hollow logical discourse which he thought too divorced from what we really thought and said, as manifested in our daily language and activities. Out of this later Wittgensteinian view arose the linguistic analysis school of philosophy and the ordinary language school, two approaches that saw the way to do philosophy as the unpacking of misused verbiage which occurs when we are led astray by superficial appearances in language. The key was to look at language as it is actually used and realize that what is meant is often quite different from what we take a word, phrase, or claim to mean.A man of religious fervour and orientation, Wittgenstein never seemed able to accept the Catholic doctrines of his youth though he was drawn inexorably towards them. His apparently homosexual orientation complicated matters and prompted a sense of self-loathing that seems to have haunted him to his final days. In this fine biography, the man’s course is carefully traced from childhood to his deathbed, writing philosophy to the last, despite his famous advice to his students to avoid the field and his belief that the best way to do philosophy was to achieve the state of understanding which enabled you to simply stop worrying about so-called philosophical problems and just walk away.SWM

⭐I bought Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein because I wanted to know why he was considered one of the 20th Century’s major philosophers. First, a word about the structure of the book. It is a detailed serial narrative – he did this and then he did that, right to the end, where he dies. Period. No concluding summary of his importance of his philosophy or other similar wrap-ups. When W publishes something or lectures seriously about something, Monk spends some brief time giving his opinion about its content, but he never dives so deep into the subject that you give up trying to follow. So this book never flagged, and I read it easily through its 600 pages. What did I conclude? One, that a lot of his reputation is based on a cult of personality, based on some of these factors: as a rising philosopher, he was young, attractive, informally dressed; in lecture he was demanding, with the speed of flow of his ideas making him hard to follow, making him mysterious. His personal eccentricities added to interest in him. Some quotes: . . . the fervent allegiance to W that was given by most of the young Cambridge philosophers as this time. Ryle was disturbed to find that veneration for W was so incontinent that mentions of any other philosophers were greeted with jeers. . . . W himself often felt that he had a bad influence on his students, People imitated his gestures, adopted his expressions, even wrote philosophy in a way that made use of his techniques – all, it seems, without understanding the point of his work. The second thing that I concluded was that his concepts were so difficult to understand that it’s questionable that there will be a continuing interest in his published works. He wrote two major books. The first, the Tractatus, he later decided that it was full of faults, and his philosophy went off in another direction, finally ending up as what was published in Philosophical Investigations. of which Monk writes: . . .Other great philosophical works can be read with interest and entertainment by someone who wants to know “what the philosopher said”. But if Philosophical Investigations is read in this spirit it will quickly become boring and a chore to read, not because it is intellectually difficult, but because it will be practically impossible to gather what W is saying. Other quotes regarding difficulty: (Regarding a series of debates with Alan Turing) , . . many of those who attended did not grasp what was at stake between the two. They were on the whole more interested in W than in mathematics. Malcolm, although he was aware that W was doing something important, understood almost nothing of the lectures until ten years later. . . . she asked him how many people he thought understood his philosophy. He pondered the question for a long time before he replied, Two”. All the above comments may be criticized by professional philosophers who will say that I can’t even follow the basic arguments that are currently interesting in philosophy. That’s probably true, but that’s largely because those arguments have little value for me. I want to add, as sort of an analogy, my reaction to a biography of Willem de Kooning, read for the same reason: why is he important? I found the same cult of personality and, on my part, the same lack of understanding of his works. People who will pay millions for one of his paintings will claim that they understand what he is saying. It’s always cool to say you understand something that you can’t have the slightest knowledge about. For me it’s true of de Kooning, and I end up wondering how true it may be of Wittgenstein. The book is highly recommended. Whether you agree with my ideas of W’s importance or not, this is a superb biography, clearly written and always interesting.

⭐Monk tells us in his introduction that people interested in Wittgenstein fall into two groups. Professional philosophers generally study his work without reference to his life, while the many readers who are fascinated by his life and personality find his philosophy unintelligible. Monk’s aim is to bridge the gap between his life and his work and to show ‘the unity of his philosophical concerns with his emotional and spiritual life’.To accomplish this, he needed both to present a full account of the man and also to explain the main ideas of his philosophy. I should say he succeeds admirably in the first aim; as for the second, his success is perhaps only partial, but that was probably inevitable, because the difficulty of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is different in kind from what is the case with most philosophers. The particular value of Monk’s book is that he explains exactly where this difficulty lies. In fact, it has at least two roots.First, philosophers’ writing may be difficult either because they express themselves obscurely or because their ideas are intrinsically difficult to understand. Wittgenstein’s difficulty is not exactly from either of these causes. He expresses himself very clearly, often in quite short sentences that are, in a sense, easy to understand; but he nearly always leaves you without the reference points you would expect. In particular, he completely refuses to announce any general conclusions, and this makes it hard to see the point of his remarks. ‘As he himself once explained at the beginning of a series of lectures: “What we say will be easy but to know why we say it will be very difficult.”‘ (p.338)Many non-professional readers probably get no further than dipping into the Tractatus, which is Wittgenstein’s first published work and the only one to appear in his lifetime. It largely achieved its final form when Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war of the Italians at the end of the First World War. I found Monk’s short paragraph describing this work to be illuminating (p.155). “In its final form, the book is a formidably compressed distillation of the work Wittgenstein had written since he first came to Cambridge in 1911. The remarks in it, selected from a series of perhaps seven manuscript volumes, are numbered to establish a hierarchy in which, say, remark 2.151 is an elaboration of 2.15, which in turn elaborates the point made in remark 2.1, and so on. Very few of the remarks are justified with an argument; each proposition is put forward, as Russell once put it, ‘as if it were a Czar’s ukase’. … [The propositions] are all allotted a place within the crystalline structure, and are each stated with the kind of finality that suggests they are all part of the same incontrovertible truth.”This exemplifies the difficulty described above. But there is a second kind of difficulty as well. To understand Wittgenstein seems to require a kind of moral seriousness on the part of the reader, particular in the case of his later work, the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously. “Philosophical Investigations—more, perhaps, then any other philosophical classic—makes demands, not just on the reader’s intelligence, but on his involvement. Other great philosophers’ works—Schopenhauer’s World and Representation,, say—can be read with interest and entertainment by someone who ‘wants to know what Schopenhauer said’. But if Philosophical Investigations is read in this spirit it will very quickly become boring and a chore to read, not because it is intellectually difficult but because it will be practically impossible to gather what Wittgenstein is ‘saying’. For in truth he is not saying anything; he is presenting a technique for the unravelling of confusions. Unless these are your confusions the book will be of very little interest.” (p.366)Given this, there may be a temptation to wonder whether Wittgenstein’s importance as a philosopher has been overstated. But this idea is hard to sustain in view of the impact that his ideas have had. “By 1939 he was recognised as the foremost philosophical genius of his time. ‘To refuse the chair [of philosophy at Cambridge] to Wittgenstein’, said C.D. Broad, ‘would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physics.’ Broad himself was no great admirer of Wittgenstein’s work; he was simply stating a fact.” (p.414).Long before this, Wittgenstein had had ‘a decisive influence on Bertrand Russell’s development as a philosopher—chiefly by undermining his faith in his own judgement.’ (p.80) Their first encounter occurred in 1911, when Wittgenstein, then a student in aeronautical engineering at Manchester University, arrived unannounced at Russell’s rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge. Russell later reported that ‘an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering at Charlottenburg, but during this course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me.’ (p.38) Russell initially thought him a crank but later decided he was a genius. Looking back on their meeting three years later, Russell described it as ‘an event of first-class importance in my life’, which had ‘affected everything I have done since’. (p.80)Wittgenstein was at first ‘passionately devoted’ to Russell but later considered him to be ‘not serious’, which, for Wittgenstein, was a damning indictment that reflects a profound difference in temperament. Wittgenstein, unlike Russell, was fundamentally religious. As Monk makes abundantly clear, this theme runs through all Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It appears as early as the Tractatus, where the concluding remarks are explicitly mystical and the book ends with the famous line: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’ Before reading Monk’s book I had been aware of this mystical element, but I hadn’t realised the extent to which it pervades practically everything Wittgenstein wrote.Religion first appears in the account of Wittgenstein’s experiences during the First World War, when he volunteered to serve in the Austrian army in order to experience suffering. This, not surprisingly, altered his outlook on life permanently. At one point he came near to suicide (three of his brothers did kill themselves) but was saved by reading the only book he could find in a bookshop he visited: Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. This brought about a religious conversion, albeit of a special kind.One might expect that Wittgenstein, as a philosopher, would discuss intellectual arguments for God’s existence, but that is something he very definitely rejected. Towards the end of his life he heard a radio discussion between A.J. Ayer and Father Copleston on ‘The Existence of God’. His reaction was not what one might have anticipated. “Ayer, Wittgenstein said, ‘has something to say but he is incredibly shallow’. Copleston, on the other hand, ‘contributed nothing at all to the discussion’. To attempt to justify the beliefs of Christianity with philosophical arguments was entirely to miss the point.” (p.543).For Wittgenstein, religious belief is psychological: ‘he does not see it as a question of whether Christianity is true but of whether it offers some help in dealing with an otherwise unbearable and meaningless existence. … And the “it” here is not a “belief” but a practice, a way of living.’ (p.122)Wittgenstein himself puts it like this: “Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., suffering of various sorts. These neither show us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts,—life can force this concept on us.” (p.572)Deciding how to live, and feelings of guilt when he failed to live ‘decently’, preoccupied Wittgenstein throughout his life. At one point he insisted on making a formal ‘Confession’ to a number of his acutely embarrassed friends, although there is little information about what he actually confessed. He had a strong tendency to asceticism. As a young man he inherited vast wealth from his father but he gave it all away. He was attracted by the idea of becoming a monk at various times in his life and tried to do so on one occasion, but was told by ‘an obviously perceptive Father Superior’ that he was unsuited to this. He spent long periods living in semi-isolation in Norway, which no doubt reflects this side of his character.A friend remarked on Wittgenstein’s ‘Hebraic’ conception of religion, meaning the sense of awe which one feels throughout the Bible (p.540). I can see this, but it also occurs to me that Wittgenstein might have found Buddhism, at least its Theravada form, sympathetic, given its lack of emphasis on belief. So far as I know this didn’t occur to him, which is perhaps surprising in view of his fondness for Schopenhauer, who was much attracted to Buddhism.Although Wittgenstein was nominally a Roman Catholic, since that was his family religion, it seems to have left little trace in him; he was actually quite surprised to be told of the traditional Catholic belief in Transsubstantiation (the doctrine that the Host literally becomes the body and blood of Christ during the Mass). Two of his friends converted to Catholicism and he worried that he might have been partly responsible for this, unwittingly, by encouraging one of them to read Kierkegaard.He has a brilliant simile to describe the difficulty of sustaining religious beliefs of this kind. “An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.” (p.463).He had the greatest respect for those who could perform this feat but he did not think he could emulate it himself. He also had a lot of respect for primitive magic, of the kind reported by anthropologists from remote parts of the world, saying: ‘All religions are wonderful … even those of the most primitive tribes. The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously.’On the other hand, he had a profound distrust of science and he disliked books of popular science, such as Sir James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe, which he thought inculcated a kind of idol-worship of science and scientists. (I can imagine what he would have said about Richard Dawkins.) A fascinating sidelight on this comes from a series of lectures on mathematics which he gave at Cambridge, with the specific aim of countering the adulation of science. Among those who attended, at least for a time, was Alan Turing, who himself was lecturing on ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’ at the time. (p.417) “The lectures often developed into a dialogue between Wittgenstein and Turing, with the former attacking and the latter defending the importance of mathematical logic. Indeed, the presence of Turing became so essential to the theme of the discussion that when he announced he would not be attending a certain lecture, Wittgenstein told the class that, therefore, that lecture would have to be ‘somewhat parenthetical’.” (p.417)There seems to have been no true meeting of minds between the two participants in these discussions, and ultimately Turing ceased attending.When told by his doctor that he had only a few days to live, he replied: ‘Good’. But his last recorded utterance was: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’In spite of his rejection of Catholic beliefs, his friends arranged for him to have a Catholic funeral. Monk thinks this may have been appropriate, ‘for, in a way that is centrally important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life.’ (p.591)

⭐Given the way Wittgenstein saw and understood reality it could be argued that a biography is the best way of getting to grips with him. Then again, as he was often insistent that very few people actually understood him, I might well be wrong. Who am I to understand him?”In the beginning was the deed”, an expression of Geothe’s that Wittgenstein approved of, and Ray Monk claims was very much indicative of his later philosophical viewpoint. Which also supports one thought that came to me during my reading of this book :- that the other human beings we see, and meet, if we wish to have true communion with them, must be SEEN first as unique/singular, prior to imposing our generalizations or whatever else upon them. What is such “seeing”? How can it come to be? Wittgenstein’s answer to this would seem to be that nothing at all can be said, that of such a question we can only be silent. Which is little help for the inquisitive, let alone the logical, or those seeking a comfortable doctrine.Anyway, I have approached much of what I see to be Wittgenstein’s thought from the “eastern” side, but as he seemed to have no knowledge of Zen, Dogen, the Tao et al, I really have no idea if I am another who totally fails to grasp just what Ludwig was talking about – or rather, NOT talking about.But an excellent biography from Ray Monk, the first half more light and enjoyable than the second, but really the actual events of Wittgenstein’s life would dictate that such would be so.Recommended.

⭐It’s a very ‘logical’ biography, running through LW’s life as it took place. There are some detours to talk about his philosophical ideas but it’s mainly a straightforward and gripping account of this bizarre and extraordinary life with myriad unexpected details: WW1 battlefields, hard-boiled pulp fiction, Snakes and Ladders, LW’s visit to Soviet Russia to look for manual work, his ghastly diet and so on. Given that there was no email haha it’s amazing how people travelled to and fro across Europe so easily.I expected rather more on the famous ‘poker’ incident – what was at stake psychologically and philosophically when Popper and LW had their famous row in Cambridge. Likewise I would have liked a final chapter attempting to sum it all up. As it is, LW lives then dies and that’s it. Given LW’s apparent sympathies with Soviet revolutionary ideas, more on how LW saw WW2 and the degeneration of Soviet Russia would have been interesting – the war and purges and famines rumble on in the background.Quibbles. Any biography is at best a tiny snapshot. And this one is a towering, readable and engrossing effort.

⭐I bought this biography and Wittgenstein’s Investigations together and was stuck for which to read first. I decided on the biography and it was a good decision. LW was a distant difficult guy but this sensitive treatment explains why. He could never join the dots with words because he realised that words were dots too! The Investigations, therefore, is a series of statements that challenge the reader to compile the context and make the relations – part of Wittgensteins showing not telling method. Highly recommend both books for Philosophy geeks but this biography is also masterful in that genre for people people 🙂

⭐There is a reason why this book is often cited as the definitive biography of Wittgenstein – it is. The sheer level of detail Monk goes into about not just Wittgenstein’s life but the way that had an impact upon his philosophy, and then to surmise and explain that philosophy; it is like he has been beamed directly into Wittgenstein’s own brain. It’s written in a fairly easy to read manner although I daresay it helps being fairly familiar with Wittgenstein’s work to begin with, especially with the notoriety he has for being a difficult read.This is an astounding book to me, but I would not recommend it to anyone with less than a resounding interest in Wittgenstein, as it is an incredibly long book which may bore a passing interest.

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