Ludwig Wittgenstein:  The Duty Of Genius, by Ray Monk

While I must say that this book did not make me think higher of Wittgenstein as a philosopher, it did give me a great deal of compassion for him as a writer.  Indeed, the author’s rather schizoid approach to romantic relationships in general, where he was a somewhat demanding person in his ethical standards and immensely hard on himself, and someone whose rather harsh and extreme statements could easily be misunderstood and misconstrued by others, are certainly problems that I can relate to from my own life.  Wittgenstein was obviously not someone who appeared to enjoy life very much and that made me feel somewhat sad as a reader of his works, not least because it was clear in reading this book that the author suffered from too vivid a life of the imagination that made his own life much less enjoyable and that it was clear that Wittgenstein did not really enjoy being alive despite the fact that he lived with a great many advantages that could have been used to make his own life and his world a better place.  Wittgenstein’s sense of duty was not enough to give him an understanding of joy and like many philosophers he saw the world as he was and not as it was.

This book is nearly 600 pages long and divided into four parts and 27 chapters that is a sizable work for any reader to struggle through.  After an introduction the author begins by discussing the youth of Wittgenstein over his first 30 years (I), which ends up involving his family’s penchant for self-destruction (1), his experiences in visiting Manchester (2), his time as Russell’s protege (3) and then master (4) as his own philosophical gifts became apparent, his time in Norway (5) in self-imposed isolation, and then his experience behind the lines (6) and in the war front (7) for a failed Austro-Hungarian effort in World War I that netted him time in a prisoner of war camp in Italy.  After that the author spends a bit of time discussing Wittgenstein’s lost decade (II) between 1919 and 1928 that found him struggling with the unprintable truth in his first book (8), his time as a rural instructor in Austria (9), and his finally coming out of the wilderness (10).  After that the author discusses the productive time he spent in Cambridge and Vienna from 1929 to 1941 (III), including his second coming to Cambridge (11), his brief phase as a verificationist philosopher (12), the clearing of the fog of his mind (13), his new beginning as a philosopher in his second period (14), his love affair with Francis (14), his interest in language games (16), his attempts to join the ranks of woke socialist philosophers (17), his confessions after a failed attempt to marry (18), the end of Austria (19), and his reluctant career as a university professor (20).  Finally, the main part of the book ends with his waning years from 1941 to 1941 (IV), including his war work (21), his time in Swansea (22), his struggle with the darkness of his time (23), his interest in perspective and framing (24), his time in Ireland (25), his isolation in the postwar world (26), and his death at Storeys End (27), after which the author discusses Bartleys Wittgenstein and coded remarks as well as the usual provision of references, a select bibliography, and an index.

After reading this book, it is likely that a great many people will not feel it necessary to read any other books of or about the subject.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was someone whose views ended up impoverishing the world of philosophy by making fewer subjects seen as worthy of philosophical interests and the number of contradictions within the subject’s personality and life are too many and too painful to deal with as a whole, ranging from his longings for love and his inability to be close and comfortably intimate, to his being a philosopher who focused his attention on word games and communication but who was a terrible communicator with others, to the extent where he was in love with someone for two years without the other person even being aware of it, to his own hatred of socialism in theory but fondness for it in his own feelings to many others.  Wittgenstein’s life was one of a great deal of misery, a fair amount of that being self-inflicted, as it happens.  One does not have to like what he said as a philosopher to feel as if his God-given gifts were wasted in large part by his failures to live the right way, failures that many smart people happen to share.