Ludwig Wittgenstein with his austere, apodictic style of writing was a fascinating figure to me as a student that I couldn’t yet grasp in my immaturity. This might have been due to the fact that I skipped one of the most important sentences of his famous work:
„And this happens as a rule in philosophy: The single thing proves over and over again to be unimportant, but the possibility of every single thing reveals something about the nature of the world.” Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.3421
The best way to understand Wittgenstein’s way of thinking is not to cling to single sentences or written works but to try to understand his complex personality that life has molded him into. The unknown Wittgenstein turns out to be multifarious and surprising.
As for his career, the multifarious Ludwig Wittgenstein pursued seven different interests during his lifetime: he was a student of mechanical engineering, of philosophy with Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore, he lived a hermit’s life in Norway, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army for World War I, worked as a primary school teacher, as an architect in Vienna and ultimately found his true calling as a professor of philosophy at Cambridge. A certain austerity and rigour is being revealed in all his doings that is also characteristic of his philosophical works. The mansion that he built with Paul Engelmann and Jacques Groag for his sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein in Vienna, follows his principles of strict logical form and clear symmetry eschewing any unnecessary embellishment. Since he felt that his philosophical work was done, he consequently resigned his academic position as professor of philosophy in Cambridge in 1947. It seems as if the matter at hand (philosophy and logic) was more important to him than any professional endeavour.
Surprisingly, Wittgenstein was also a generous benefactor, recluse and religious thinker. Born into the influential and wealthy family of Wittgenstein, he donated 100.000 crowns to Austrian artists, with the help of the editor of the newspaper „Der Brenner“, in the summer of 1914. Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to his family mentally spent after World War I and divided his entire fortune among his siblings who still lived in Europe in 1919. From this point forward, he had to earn his living, but it seemed as if his mentor and friend Bertrand Russell was not terribly surprised by Wittgenstein’s drastic actions.1 In the far North, deep in the longest and deepest fjord of Europe where fjord meets ragged mountains, in a Norwegian place called Skjolden, is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s secluded hut located. Immersing himself in nature and inspiring solitude, Wittgenstein worked on his Tractatus and spent his time with critical thinking in tranquil isolation. According to Russell, he aimed to mainly solve the problems of logic in calm surroundings. Hoping to solve the problems of logic in his secluded hut is comprehensible, as philosophical thinking of this nature is done best without any distraction. While of Jewish origins, he was baptised in the Roman-Catholic Church. God, religious belief and the difference of religious and scientific language was something that Wittgenstein thought deeply about in his diaries and his lecture “On religious belief”. This seems to contradict his claim in the Tractatus that it is logically nonsensical to speak about things being beyond the facts in the world (beyond the limits of the phenomenal world and of language) – and this pertains to God2 and religion. However, he seemed to be fascinated by that “which cannot be put into words”. Wittgenstein was a religious thinker in that he retained a respect for the big questions in life such as the meaning of life, belief, conscience and destiny.3 On the 11th of June 1916, his entry in his diary reads: „The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. [...] To pray is to think about the meaning of life.” Thusly, there is a world beyond that is unfathomable and transcendental. There is a world about which we can say meaningful things (to express facts) and a world about which we cannot say any meaningful things (to express the supernatural) given that this world is independent of our own will.4 On the 8th of July 1916, he writes: „There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.” God is the world independent of our will. The alien will on which I appear dependent (fate), that is God. What is conscience then? According to Wittgenstein, conscience is the voice of God. These notebooks show how Wittgenstein left the perimeter of where we can say meaningful things and where not.
To look for the private and enigmatic Ludwig Wittgenstein in all his writings, for the critical professor and driven thinker is a worthwhile endeavour. Wittgenstein was a genius or as John Maynard Keynes put it in his letter on the 18th of January 1929 to his future wife, Lydia Lopokova, about Wittgenstein’s arrival in Cambridge: „God has arrived, I met him on the 5.15 train.”5