Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (Vienna 26 April 1889 - 14 October 1928) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathermatics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, best known for his only and seminal work, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922, Logical-Philosophical Treatise).
Born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families (the Wittgensteins possessing the whole Austrian steel cartel), Wittgenstein, the youngest of the family, was destined to succeed one day to his father : the harsh upbringing would lead to the suicide of three of his brothers. Taught by private tutors at home until he was 14, he attended the Realschule in Linz before studying engineering in Berlin (at the Technische Hochschule, getting his diploma in 1908) and Manchester (Victoria University, dropping out in 1911), before turning to the foundations of mathermatics after reading Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, eventually attending the University of Cambridge to attend Russell’s classes, eventually growing frustrated. Returning to Austria in 1913, Wittgenstein soon inherited his father’s fortune, became benefactor to artists such as Rainer Maria Rike and Georg Trakl and settled in Norway, working on Logik, the first version of his magnum opus.
When the Great European War erupted, Wittgenstein had already begun his work on the Tractatus, but he immediately volunteered for the Austrian Army, serving on the Russian front as a lieutenant and receiving various medals for bravery (Military merit, Silver Medal for Valour), ending the war in captivity. Wittgenstein returned from the war a deeply changed man ; as he had completed the Tractatus during military leave in 1918, he divided his fortune between his siblings and to become an elementary school teacher in the Austrian countryside.
Taking up teaching posts starting in 1922, after the publication and translation of the Tractatus, Wittenstein became an overnight sensation in logician and philosophical circles, Wittgenstein quickly acquired a reputation as a eccentric and downright abusive teacher, beating boys and girls alike, even in the context of pre-Danubian War Austria. As Wittgenstein lived in isolation in spite of his growing celebrity, he had to resign from his teaching post after he had beaten viciously a 11 year-old pupil, Josef Haidbauer. Wittgenstein returned to Vienna, joining a circle of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians inspired by the Tractatus ; after working for a while as a gardner in a monastery and pondering about becoming a monk, later helping to design a house for his sister, Wittengenstin considered returning to philosophy in England ; but the Danubian War broke out and Wittgenstein further isolated himself at home in front of the chaos that seized the Empire, in spite of the pleas from his friends to flee.
On 14 October 1928, a week after the violent putsch of Glaise von Horstenau, a group of Landbund paramilitaries forced their entry into Wittgenstein’s apartment in Vienna ; even if many saw in the break-in an antisemtic motive, it seemed that the roughnecks were more interested in the supposed riches of the Wittgenstein family than by the philosopher’s reputation. Upon seeing the ascetic lifestyle of Wittgenstein along with the absence of money, the paramilitaries were met by harsh insults and yells : Ludwig Wittgenstein died there, shot in the head, before the paramilitaries destroyed his home. His body was recovered the following day by his sister.
One of his correspondants, John Meynard Keynes, summed up the catastrophe that the murder of Wittgenstein meant : “he was just getting out of isolation and returning to philosophy, after revolutizing the field in just one short book. One could wonder what Wittgenstein could have produced had he lived”. In his letters, Wittgenstein seemed to have reconsidered the ideas outlined in the Tractatus : his private works up to 1928 were however lost during the ransacking of his home and the chaos of the Danubian War ; fragments were discovered in 1953 in the cave of one of his assassins, eventually published as Philosophical Investigations, heavily annotated by Bertrand Russell.
Seen as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century, some considering him “the most important since Immanuel Kant”, Wittgenstein contributed to a massive breakthrough with the Tractatus, judging that he had solved all philosophical problems through the logical relationship between propositions and the world, even if debate still rages among scholars as of whether or not they have truly understood the scope of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In popular culture, his life was the subject of a British film by Michael Radford, “Wittgenstein”, released in 1993 with Tim Roth in the title role, winning the Academy Award for Best Film in 1994.
