Ludwig Wittgenstein

The title of Bruce Duffy's book suggests the path Duffy will take to illustrate the life and times of the intellectually curious Ludwig Wittgenstein. The title suggests a pre-existing world community into which Wittgenstein enters, and this is indeed how Duffy chooses to introduce and explore the temporal characteristics and intellectual attributes of the world in which Wittgenstein lived and on which he left his mark.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, Austria. His father, Karl Wittgenstein was a wealthy steel magnate who also patronized the arts. He fathered seven children with his wife, Poldy, of whom Ludwig was the youngest. Although the family's heritage was Jewish, the Wittgensteins had been baptized Protestant and Catholic. The children were baptized in to Catholicism. Duffy finds it significant on Ludwig's development that he became assimilated into an anti-semitic community such as Catholic Vienna, especially after the out-break of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany during the 1940s:

For Wittgenstein, it was not the sheer extent of the catastrophe that he felt, or the daily news of it, so much as the sheer antediluvian depth of it. It had been so long in coming. For this, whole ages of hatred had been stored up like explosives. For this, whole ages of culture had been in a long and steady decline. . . . Philosophically, he found himself returning to the same questions in the way the painter returns

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of philosophy. Interestingly enough, the confrontational nature of the first meeting between Wittgenstein and Russell would be echoed in their last meeting in 1946 during the meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club. Duffy describes Russell as, among other things, an educator, journalist, sexual revolutionary, libertarian, peace advocate and moral leader (p. 10). He was persuasive and charming to those in a position to either help or hurt him, but he could also be crafty and sly when he felt his academic position was threatened. Like Wittgenstein and the complicated love/hate relationship he had with his father and family, Duffy believes Russell's father was important in his choice of lifestyle. Russell's father had been Lord Amberly, who "knowingly scotched his political career by supporting birth control" (p. 83). Russell would later jeopardize his own security, and was even jailed for six months, for speaking out against governmental policy during World War I. One of Russell's greatest fears was any questioning of his standing and reputation within the intellectual elite he inhabited. Consequently, he was very protective of his position and wary of any possible threats to his position. Although he was the first to r
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Approximate Word count = 1455
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)