Two of his older brothers committed suicide, and Wittgenstein himself struggled with emotional turmoil throughout his life. His father was a wealthy industrialist, and the Wittgenstein fortune (in which Ludwig ultimately disowned his portion of the inheritance) provides his initial and immediate background. Wittgenstein was born in 1889 to a large Viennese family. Monk does this expertly– no small accomplishment, because for Wittgenstein all three of these aspects are so complex. This is the challenge of any biography, I suppose: to balance the cultural and historical background of a person’s age with the personal and emotional foreground of the individual’s own psyche and link this to an understanding of how a person creates or does whatever it is that makes her or him worthy of having a biography written. Monk paints a vivid portrait of Wittgenstein as an individual and as a philosopher.
Monk’s authoritative biography seemed the place to begin. It was my recent re-reading of Logicomix that spurred me to learn more about Wittgenstein himself. Wittgenstein also shows up as a peripheral character in Logicomix, a wonderful graphic novel on the intersection between mathematics and philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, which I reviewed here. I’ve never read his first and most well-known work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but I know something of its influence through a course on the Vienna Circle, the inter-war group of European philosophers who left their indelible mark on modern theorizing regarding science and language. Ludwig Wittgenstein is widely regarded to be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
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