Eleventh Issue: Ludwig Wittgenstein
This week’s newsletter is about Ludwig Wittgenstein. He’s fairly well-known, but I had never heard of him and he had a fascinating life, so he gets a whole newsletter dedicated to him.
So Ludwig’s father was Karl, who was one of the richest men in Europe. Ludwig was born in 1889 in a palace, one of nine siblings. Ludwig was the baby. The Wittgenstein siblings were raised in a very intense environment. They were all homeschooled, and their father was a patron of the arts. There were regular concerts by famous musicians and they were painted by famous artists. Ludwig wasn’t impressed by the concerts. He didn’t like any of the ‘modern music’, saying that “Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery”. Ludwig had absolute pitch and was really good at whistling lengthy detailed pieces of music. He also played the clarinet.
One of Ludwig’s siblings died as an infant, and three of his brothers committed suicide. The family environment was not good and there was a history of mental illness, specifically depression and possibly Asperger’s Syndrome. The siblings were interested in music with “an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on pathological”. The eldest brother, Hans, was a musical prodigy, but he ended up running away and killing himself. The second eldest brother, Kurt, shot himself during World War I when his troops refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse.The third brother, Rudi, was studying chemistry when he committed suicide in a bar, asking the pianist to play a song called “Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I” and mixing himself a drink of milk and cyanide. He was probably gay, since he left a note talking about his “perverted disposition” and he had been asking advice from an organization fighting against a section of the German criminal code prohibiting gay sex. Their father prohibited any of the other siblings from mentioning his name ever again.
After the three brothers died, Ludwig’s dad did let his remaining two songs attend school. Ludwig went to school for three years and stayed with the family of a local teacher. He was different than the other boys, with his excessively formal manners and dress. The other boys bullied him, saying "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts" (Wittgenstein strolls wistfully Vienna-wards due to adverse winds), which I guess is an insulting tongue twister in German? Anyway, he did do really well in religious studies but not very well in anything else, and he was a really bad speller.
Ludwig was ¾ Jewish, but he was raised Catholic. It is interesting to think about this because he was at the same school at the same time as Adolf Hitler. The boys probably met each other, but some scholars have actually said that Ludwig might have actually fed Hitler’s antisemitism. That ASTOUNDS ME!!! No matter how much of a brat Ludwig was, do some people seriously think that this one kid was the REASON Hitler hated Jews???? It makes no sense and it is almost like they are trying to blame the Holocaust on the Jews which is SO OFFENSIVE AND PREPOSTEROUS. ANYWAY Ludwig was raised Catholic so would anyone even know/think he was Jewish??? This is what he looked like at age eighteen.
Ludwig went to university in Berlin, and became interested in aeronautics. He went to Manchester and wanted to do his doctorate and design and fly his own plane. Here he also became interested in the foundations of mathematics. He switched his major (or whatever you would call a major at the time) and became super into this one scholar called Gottlob Frege. He met with Frege, who told him to go study with Bertrand Russell instead.
“On 18 October 1911 Russell was having tea with C. K. Ogden, when, according to Russell, "an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. " He was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them. Wittgenstein started following him after lectures back to his rooms to discuss more philosophy, until it was time for the evening meal in Hall. Russell grew irritated; he wrote to his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My German friend threatens to be an infliction." Russell soon came to believe that Wittgenstein was a genius, especially after he had examined Wittgenstein's written work. "Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." Three months after Wittgenstein's arrival Russell told Morrell: "I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is the young man one hopes for. "
In 1912 Ludwig joined the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club and presented papers on philosophy. He basically took over the club and he ended up quitting in 1930 when people complained he wouldn’t let anyone else speak. Just to give you an idea of this guy’s personality.
Ludwig was bisexual! He dated three men (David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, and Ben Richards) and he dated a woman as a teen and proposed to another woman, Marguerite Respinger as an adult.
Ludwig’s dad died in 1913 and Ludwig got a lot of money. He donated to some Austrian artists and writers, and eventually retreated to a village in Norway to work on his academic writing in peace. He learned Norweigian and Danish there. He wrote a book called Logik, and submitted it to Cambridge as sufficient for Ludwig to get a bachelor’s degree. They said no because it wasn’t formatted right without any footnotes or preface. Ludwig was MAD about this. He said "If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly; and if I am worth it and you don't do it then—by God—you might go there."
When World War I broke out, Ludwig served on a ship and in an artillery workshop. He was wounded, and then re-posted to the Russian front. He was commended for his “exceptionally courageous behavior” and wom a few medals for bravery. He was promoted to lieutenant and fought at the Italian front and the Austrian offensive in 1918. While fighting, he kept journals and not only wrote philosophical stuff but also just insults about the character of the other soldiers he was with. The war took a lot out of him, and his uncle died around this time. Then his old boyfriend David Pinsent died, and Ludwig was captured by Allied forces and sent to live for nine months in a prisoner of war camp. He became suicidal.
Ludwig decided to change his life. He went to teacher training college and decided to become an elementary school teacher. He gave away all his money to his siblings. His sister said that Ludwig “working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates”, but they let him do what he wanted. He worked in 1920 in a village of only a few hundred people. He said it was beautiful there, but he also said that he was “surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.” What a rude dude.
Anyway, Ludwig did not get along with other teachers, though he was enthusiastic and offered late-night extra teaching to students who did well. His sister said that the students “literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations”. Ludwig was not as patient with the slower kids though. He caned the boys and boxed their ears and pulled the girls’ hair. Physical punishment against boys was normal at the time but not for girls. The villagers didn’t like him much, especially when he started shouting NONSENSE! every time the local priest answered children’s questions.
Anyway, while Ludwig was living in this village, he published a book called the Tractatus.This book was about the relationship with language and the world. Ludwig said that basically thought and ideas are limited by language. The limits of language are the limits of philosophy. This book is what he’s known for.
In 1922, he switched schools, but said that “these people are not human at all but loathsome worms”. He moved schools again, where he said the people were “one-quarter animal and three-quarters human”. Great guy, that Ludwig. His buddy Frank Ramsey came to visit him, and he saw that his living situation was very bare, so he and Ludwig’s other friends tried to persuade him to come back to Cambridge. Ludwig refused.
"[Wittgenstein's family] are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid's food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren't on good terms but because he won't have any money he hasn't earned ... It is an awful pity."
Ludwig switched schools again, and wrote a pronunciation and spelling dictionary for children. In 1926, Ludwig got in trouble. An eleven year old boy named Josef was a slow learner, and Ludwig hit him in the head in class one day. He collapsed and Ludwig left him in the headmaster’s office. He bumped into another parent on his way out, this parent was the father of a girl that Ludwig had pulled so hard by the ears that they bled. He tried to get Ludwig arrested, but instead, Ludwig just resigned and decided to stop being a teacher. Ludwig’s family may have covered up any ongoing hearings or trials. Ten years later, Ludwig went back to the village and visited some of his former student to apologize.
Anyway, if you remember that book he wrote, the Tractatus, it was gaining traction and Ludwig became internationally famous. A group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians known as the Vienna Circle would meet and discuss the book. Ludwig went a couple times, but he was annoyed. Sometimes he’d be so mad at their ‘msireading’ of his work that he’d turn his back to them and read poetry aloud.
In the mid 1920s, Ludwig’s sister asked him to help design her new townhouse. He agreed, and spent a LOT of time and money on it. He spent one full year to design the door handles. The house was beautiful but too palatial for his sister’s tastes, she confessed.
Ludwig went back to Cambridge in 1929. Even though he was famous he didn’t have a degree so he couldn’t work there. He offered the Tractatus as his thesis, and at the end of his defense he told the examiners, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it”. They gave him a PhD and made him a lecturer.
In 1938, Ludwig went to Ireland to visit a friend. He wanted to become a psychiatrist and give up philosophy, so he thought he might learn psychiatry there from the friend. While he was there, Germany annexed Austria, and Ludwig became a Jew according to the new laws, because three of his four grandparents were Jewish. Hitler personally granted a superior status to Ludwig and his family. There were 2100 applications for this status and only 12 were granted. It was probably because of their wealth, which they signed over to the Nazis. Paul, the one brother married to a Jewish woman, was disgusted with all of this and left to the United States. He never contacted his siblings again.
I’m losing my stamina here so I’ll sum up the rest of his life. Ludwig went and worked as a dispensary porter in a hospital, delivering drugs from the pharmacy to the wards, where he “advised the patients not to take them”. What a fool.
He got depressed, writing in 1942 “"I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless."
He met a young doctor who was studying road traffic and industrial casualties, and Ludwig moved to Newcastle for a year to help him out as a laboratory assistant. He resigned his professorship in 1947, and focused on his writing. He was diagnosed with anemia and prescribed iron and liver pills. He lived with a friend in Ithaca, New York for a few months in 1949. Returning to London, he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. He spent two months with his sister Hermine, who died in 1950. “Great loss for me and all of us, greater than I would have thought,” he wrote. He moved around after that, staying with friends. Ludwig died in 1951, a few days after he turned sixty-two. His former students came to his bedside, and since he was raised Catholic, they prayed for him.
What an interesting asshole of a man. There's more details on his Wikipedia page, which is very long, and a lot more pictures! Thanks for reading.
So Ludwig’s father was Karl, who was one of the richest men in Europe. Ludwig was born in 1889 in a palace, one of nine siblings. Ludwig was the baby. The Wittgenstein siblings were raised in a very intense environment. They were all homeschooled, and their father was a patron of the arts. There were regular concerts by famous musicians and they were painted by famous artists. Ludwig wasn’t impressed by the concerts. He didn’t like any of the ‘modern music’, saying that “Music came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery”. Ludwig had absolute pitch and was really good at whistling lengthy detailed pieces of music. He also played the clarinet.
One of Ludwig’s siblings died as an infant, and three of his brothers committed suicide. The family environment was not good and there was a history of mental illness, specifically depression and possibly Asperger’s Syndrome. The siblings were interested in music with “an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on pathological”. The eldest brother, Hans, was a musical prodigy, but he ended up running away and killing himself. The second eldest brother, Kurt, shot himself during World War I when his troops refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse.The third brother, Rudi, was studying chemistry when he committed suicide in a bar, asking the pianist to play a song called “Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I” and mixing himself a drink of milk and cyanide. He was probably gay, since he left a note talking about his “perverted disposition” and he had been asking advice from an organization fighting against a section of the German criminal code prohibiting gay sex. Their father prohibited any of the other siblings from mentioning his name ever again.
After the three brothers died, Ludwig’s dad did let his remaining two songs attend school. Ludwig went to school for three years and stayed with the family of a local teacher. He was different than the other boys, with his excessively formal manners and dress. The other boys bullied him, saying "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts" (Wittgenstein strolls wistfully Vienna-wards due to adverse winds), which I guess is an insulting tongue twister in German? Anyway, he did do really well in religious studies but not very well in anything else, and he was a really bad speller.
Ludwig was ¾ Jewish, but he was raised Catholic. It is interesting to think about this because he was at the same school at the same time as Adolf Hitler. The boys probably met each other, but some scholars have actually said that Ludwig might have actually fed Hitler’s antisemitism. That ASTOUNDS ME!!! No matter how much of a brat Ludwig was, do some people seriously think that this one kid was the REASON Hitler hated Jews???? It makes no sense and it is almost like they are trying to blame the Holocaust on the Jews which is SO OFFENSIVE AND PREPOSTEROUS. ANYWAY Ludwig was raised Catholic so would anyone even know/think he was Jewish??? This is what he looked like at age eighteen.
Ludwig went to university in Berlin, and became interested in aeronautics. He went to Manchester and wanted to do his doctorate and design and fly his own plane. Here he also became interested in the foundations of mathematics. He switched his major (or whatever you would call a major at the time) and became super into this one scholar called Gottlob Frege. He met with Frege, who told him to go study with Bertrand Russell instead.
“On 18 October 1911 Russell was having tea with C. K. Ogden, when, according to Russell, "an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. " He was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them. Wittgenstein started following him after lectures back to his rooms to discuss more philosophy, until it was time for the evening meal in Hall. Russell grew irritated; he wrote to his lover Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My German friend threatens to be an infliction." Russell soon came to believe that Wittgenstein was a genius, especially after he had examined Wittgenstein's written work. "Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." Three months after Wittgenstein's arrival Russell told Morrell: "I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is the young man one hopes for. "
In 1912 Ludwig joined the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club and presented papers on philosophy. He basically took over the club and he ended up quitting in 1930 when people complained he wouldn’t let anyone else speak. Just to give you an idea of this guy’s personality.
Ludwig was bisexual! He dated three men (David Pinsent, Francis Skinner, and Ben Richards) and he dated a woman as a teen and proposed to another woman, Marguerite Respinger as an adult.
Ludwig’s dad died in 1913 and Ludwig got a lot of money. He donated to some Austrian artists and writers, and eventually retreated to a village in Norway to work on his academic writing in peace. He learned Norweigian and Danish there. He wrote a book called Logik, and submitted it to Cambridge as sufficient for Ludwig to get a bachelor’s degree. They said no because it wasn’t formatted right without any footnotes or preface. Ludwig was MAD about this. He said "If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly; and if I am worth it and you don't do it then—by God—you might go there."
When World War I broke out, Ludwig served on a ship and in an artillery workshop. He was wounded, and then re-posted to the Russian front. He was commended for his “exceptionally courageous behavior” and wom a few medals for bravery. He was promoted to lieutenant and fought at the Italian front and the Austrian offensive in 1918. While fighting, he kept journals and not only wrote philosophical stuff but also just insults about the character of the other soldiers he was with. The war took a lot out of him, and his uncle died around this time. Then his old boyfriend David Pinsent died, and Ludwig was captured by Allied forces and sent to live for nine months in a prisoner of war camp. He became suicidal.
Ludwig decided to change his life. He went to teacher training college and decided to become an elementary school teacher. He gave away all his money to his siblings. His sister said that Ludwig “working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates”, but they let him do what he wanted. He worked in 1920 in a village of only a few hundred people. He said it was beautiful there, but he also said that he was “surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.” What a rude dude.
Anyway, Ludwig did not get along with other teachers, though he was enthusiastic and offered late-night extra teaching to students who did well. His sister said that the students “literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations”. Ludwig was not as patient with the slower kids though. He caned the boys and boxed their ears and pulled the girls’ hair. Physical punishment against boys was normal at the time but not for girls. The villagers didn’t like him much, especially when he started shouting NONSENSE! every time the local priest answered children’s questions.
Anyway, while Ludwig was living in this village, he published a book called the Tractatus.This book was about the relationship with language and the world. Ludwig said that basically thought and ideas are limited by language. The limits of language are the limits of philosophy. This book is what he’s known for.
In 1922, he switched schools, but said that “these people are not human at all but loathsome worms”. He moved schools again, where he said the people were “one-quarter animal and three-quarters human”. Great guy, that Ludwig. His buddy Frank Ramsey came to visit him, and he saw that his living situation was very bare, so he and Ludwig’s other friends tried to persuade him to come back to Cambridge. Ludwig refused.
"[Wittgenstein's family] are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid's food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren't on good terms but because he won't have any money he hasn't earned ... It is an awful pity."
Ludwig switched schools again, and wrote a pronunciation and spelling dictionary for children. In 1926, Ludwig got in trouble. An eleven year old boy named Josef was a slow learner, and Ludwig hit him in the head in class one day. He collapsed and Ludwig left him in the headmaster’s office. He bumped into another parent on his way out, this parent was the father of a girl that Ludwig had pulled so hard by the ears that they bled. He tried to get Ludwig arrested, but instead, Ludwig just resigned and decided to stop being a teacher. Ludwig’s family may have covered up any ongoing hearings or trials. Ten years later, Ludwig went back to the village and visited some of his former student to apologize.
Anyway, if you remember that book he wrote, the Tractatus, it was gaining traction and Ludwig became internationally famous. A group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians known as the Vienna Circle would meet and discuss the book. Ludwig went a couple times, but he was annoyed. Sometimes he’d be so mad at their ‘msireading’ of his work that he’d turn his back to them and read poetry aloud.
In the mid 1920s, Ludwig’s sister asked him to help design her new townhouse. He agreed, and spent a LOT of time and money on it. He spent one full year to design the door handles. The house was beautiful but too palatial for his sister’s tastes, she confessed.
In 1938, Ludwig went to Ireland to visit a friend. He wanted to become a psychiatrist and give up philosophy, so he thought he might learn psychiatry there from the friend. While he was there, Germany annexed Austria, and Ludwig became a Jew according to the new laws, because three of his four grandparents were Jewish. Hitler personally granted a superior status to Ludwig and his family. There were 2100 applications for this status and only 12 were granted. It was probably because of their wealth, which they signed over to the Nazis. Paul, the one brother married to a Jewish woman, was disgusted with all of this and left to the United States. He never contacted his siblings again.
I’m losing my stamina here so I’ll sum up the rest of his life. Ludwig went and worked as a dispensary porter in a hospital, delivering drugs from the pharmacy to the wards, where he “advised the patients not to take them”. What a fool.
He got depressed, writing in 1942 “"I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless."
He met a young doctor who was studying road traffic and industrial casualties, and Ludwig moved to Newcastle for a year to help him out as a laboratory assistant. He resigned his professorship in 1947, and focused on his writing. He was diagnosed with anemia and prescribed iron and liver pills. He lived with a friend in Ithaca, New York for a few months in 1949. Returning to London, he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. He spent two months with his sister Hermine, who died in 1950. “Great loss for me and all of us, greater than I would have thought,” he wrote. He moved around after that, staying with friends. Ludwig died in 1951, a few days after he turned sixty-two. His former students came to his bedside, and since he was raised Catholic, they prayed for him.
What an interesting asshole of a man. There's more details on his Wikipedia page, which is very long, and a lot more pictures! Thanks for reading.
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