The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      Ludwig Wittgenstein

      Philosophy of language

      29 April 1951

      Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in his sixty-second year on Sunday at Cambridge, was a philosopher with a reputation as an intellectual innovator on the highest level. His earlier and later work formed the points of origin of two schools of philosophy, both of which he himself disowned.

      He came from a well-known Austrian family (his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon), and he was brought up in Vienna. After studying engineering at Manchester he went to Cambridge in 1912 as an ‘advanced student’ to study under Bertrand (now Lord) Russell. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he returned to Austria to serve with the Austrian Army until he was taken prisoner in 1918 in the Italian campaign. While thus serving he completed a manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which, appearing in 1921 in German in the last number of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie and in English in book form in 1922, at once made for its author an international reputation.

      Throughout his life Wittgenstein showed the characteristics of a religious contemplative of the hermit type. Thus he alternated between periods of great prominence in academic life and periods of extreme abnegation and retirement, and in 1922 he renounced his fortune and took a post as a schoolmaster in a mountain village near Wiener Neustadt. Here he stayed until 1928. He maintained, however, contacts with Vienna, where he went in the school holidays and where, through his acquaintance with the Professor of Philosophy, Moritz Schlick, he originated a school of philosophy – the famous Vienna Circle, later known as the logical positivists.

      Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of his ideas, Wittgenstein’s historical importance in this period consists in the fact that through him the work of a long series of formal logicians, culminating in Russell, became known to the inheritors of an equally long tradition of philosophy of science, culminating in Mach (Schlick’s predecessor in his chair). The intellectual results of this fusion were such that, a decade later, they spread all over the philosophic world. By this time, however, Wittgenstein was reinstalled in Cambridge, having arrived there for a short visit in 1929. Trinity College elected him to a five-year research fellowship in 1930, and he also started lecturing. Apart from one paper in 1929, he published nothing in this period; but two sets of notes, dictated to groups of pupils and known respectively as The Blue Book and The Brown Book, were widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.

      In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.

      We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.