Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig
EDITED BY BRIAN McGUINNESS, TRANSLATED BY PETER WINSLOW
(Bloomsbury academic, 336 PP, £24.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £22.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Bertrand Russell demonstrated powerfully that philosophers’ life stories help us understand their work. The story of his protégé Wittgenstein has puzzled so many that there has been intense curiosity about the man himself. Some of his forceful propositions, in the Tractatus for example, including the last (“whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”) are indeed so gnomic, challenging and apparently eccentric, that they beg many a question of their inventor.
These letters, even though many are missing, and many topics not discussed, help to suggest some partial answers. Professor McGuinness is the perfect editor: translator of the Tractatus, author of the excellent Young Ludwig, and editor of the Cambridge Letters to and from Russell and others, he provides a perceptive introduction to the Wittgensteins, and numerous notes which make this book interesting to scholars and amateurs alike.
Ludwig may well have been the least difficult, as well as the youngest, of the five brothers – three of whom committed suicide. All were hard on themselves, as their immensely successful father had been on both himself and them – Ludwig once declared, “Of course I want to be perfect!” He writes to sister Hermine, “I’m constantly thinking about whether I’ll ever be a decent human being”; in another he calls himself a “swine”.
