Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy

by James C. Klagge (Editor)

This collection of new essays deals with the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and his philosophy. The first two essays reflect on general problems inherent in philosophical biography itself. The essays that follow draw on recently published letters as well as recently published diaries from the 1930s to explore Wittgenstein's background as an engineer and its relation to the Tractatus, the impact of his schizoid personality on his approach to philosophy, his role as a diarist, letter-writer and polemicist, and finally the complex issue of Wittgenstein as a Jew.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction

292 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 2001

Reviews

[Paul Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book - I found all of the essays interesting but the one I enjoyed the most (and the reason I wanted to read the book) was Louis Sass's essay, which explores how certain aspects of how Wittgenstein saw and experienced the world are reflected in his philosophy (both early and late). He suggests that Wittgenstein had a schizothymic (or non-psychotic schizoid) personality which gave him a tendency to osillate between contact and isolation, sometimes wanting to abstract himself from the world and his body and adopt an extreme external view and sometimes wanting to achieve a sense of oneness, but never being able to find satisfaction in either position. He sees Wittgenstein as having a great ability to step back and adopt meta-positions but also hating the splitting that this involves, so he dreams of abandonning these endless recursive moves and instead being able simply to be. By the same token, despite spending his life focussing on words and distinctions, his dream is to stop speaking and either replace saying with showing or get below and beyond words to action. This was a new perspective on Wittgenstein for me and I found it really interesting. I think Louis Sass would agree that you don't need this sort of perspective to understand Wittgenstein's philosophical writings but if you are really interested in him, it gives you an additional way of understanding some of the things that might have led him to live, think and write as he did.