When Wittgenstein died in 1951 he was given a Roman Catholic burial. It is a huge irony that Wittgenstein, who sympathized with the Communist Left (at one point he wanted to live in the Soviet Union), should have developed in his later philosophy one of the strongest conservative critiques of progressivism and scientism. In this he was still following Weininger, and was clearly deeply influenced as well by Spengler. In the 1930’s, too, he became increasingly concerned to counteract what he saw as the unjustified and harmful worship of science-unjustified because scientific truths could never have absolute validity, harmful because the assumption of scientific generality could lead people to neglect the wonder of the world’s irreducible variety, and to misunderstand what was truly important in life: the world of the spirit, of ethics and aesthetics, that which could be shown but not said, as he had so famously put it in the Tractatus. I met him on the 5:15 train.”īy now Wittgenstein was in the process of completely revising his notions of language and logic, a process which led in his “second” philosophy to a view of language understood in terms of its use and its dependence on culture and tradition.
Monk quotes John Maynard Keynes on his erstwhile friend’s return: “Well, God has arrived. But it was only on his return to Cambridge in January 1929 that his career as a philosopher really resumed. Throughout the 1920’s he remained in touch with his former Cambridge friends and was also consulted by the group of philosophers who came to be known as the Vienna Circle. This was not a success eventually Wittgenstein returned to civilization, first becoming an architect and then going back to philosophy.
He gave away his immense fortune to other members of his family and trained to be a teacher in the Austrian countryside. Monk is particularly good at describing how the spiritual turmoil of those years transformed what had started in Wittgenstein as a pure interest in logic (he had shaken off his father’s wish that he take up a technical vocation and gone to Cambridge to become Russell’s protégé) into the postwar Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with its mysterious statements on the self, ethics, and aesthetics.įollowing his new-found religious fervor, Wittgenstein, after time in a prisoner-of-war camp, dedicated himself to an ascetic life of service. God was conscience, Christianity not a matter of doctrine but entirely of practice, of attitude. By 1916 his reading of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, combined with his background in Schopenhauer and Weininger, had led him to a belief in God and Christianity, if in a typically abstract, almost solipsistic, way. During World War I, Wittgenstein experienced a kind of religious conversion.
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