Ray Monk - How to Read Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951) was by universal agreement one of greatest and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. There, however, the agreement stops. The question of how to read him is one that has excited a great deal of controversy ever since his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921. There is no consensus on how that book should be interpreted, nor on how his later work, Philosophical Investigations, ought to be read, nor again on the extent to which the later work repudiates the earlier.

In this context, it is extremely presumptuous to publish a book called How to ReadWittgenstein. I apologize in advance for doing so and want to make it clear that what I offer here is only one possible way of reading Wittgenstein.

The extracts from Wittgensteins own writings that are reproduced and discussed below are arranged in broadly chronological order and I give some biographical details in amongst the commentary that I offer. However, it might be as well to begin with a summary:

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was an industrialist who owned practically the whole of the Austrian iron and steel industry. Under his fathers influence, Wittgenstein studied engineering, first at Berlin and then at Manchester, but then became gripped by philosophical questions and came to Cambridge in the autumn of 1911 to study with Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein quickly became Russells favourite pupil and the one to whom Russell looked for a solution to the unresolved questions in the philosophy of logic. In 1913, Wittgenstein left Cambridge to live alone in Norway, hoping that the solitude would help his concentration. He spent a year there, thinking about logic, before returning to Vienna on the eve of the First World War.

During the war, Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army and, at the end of the war, was taken prisoner by the Italians. By that time, he had finished Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, however, was not published until 1921. Thinking he had, in that book, solved all philosophical problems, Wittgenstein gave up philosophy and became a schoolteacher. His time as a teacher was short, unsuccessful and miserable and in 1926 he switched to being an architect, before, in 1929, returning to Cambridge to work on philosophy again, having become convinced that the Tractatus did not, after all, provide the final solution to all the problems of philosophy.

From 1929 until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein worked out a new way of doing philosophy that has no precedent in the history of the subject. It is a way of approaching philosophy that tries to remain faithful to the insight he had in the Tractatus that philosophy cannot be a science, or anything like a science. It is not a body of doctrine but an activity, the activity of clearing up the confusions caused by the bewitchments cast by language.

This conception of the subject is, in my opinion, Wittgensteins most radical and most important contribution to philosophy.