He would spend the next few years working on an architectural project ideated by his sister Margaret the building, now known as Haus Wittgenstein, can still be seen and visited in Vienna. After changing teaching posts several times, he finally gave up on teaching after a boy he had hit collapsed, an incident for which he was later tried in court. His attempts quickly failed: he was far too refined and eccentric to fit in with the small-town folks, and his eagerness for physical punishment was not well-received. After the end of the war, a demoralized Ludwig Wittgenstein decided to give up on philosophy and pursue a simpler life as an elementary school teacher in a remote Austrian village. These painful years proved to be critical. The Philosopher Who Didn’t Want To Be A Philosopher A distraught Wittgenstein returned from his military leave, only to be captured by the Allies he ended up spending nine months in a POW camp. In addition to that, the publishing house to which he had sent a copy of the Tractatus decided not to publish the book. In the span of just a couple of months, his uncle, his brother, and his close friend and lover would die unexpectedly. After four years of service, the philosopher was granted military leave, during which he stayed at the family home this would prove to be an exceptionally unfortunate time for him. Frege was impressed by the young philosopher and convinced him to study under Bertrand Russell, who would go on to become Wittgenstein’s mentor.Īfter being introduced into the world of philosophy, the young Wittgenstein worked incessantly on what would later become his first published book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His work was interrupted by the outbreak of WWI in 1914, for which he immediately enlisted. This new fascination culminated in his decision to contact Gottlob Frege, a logician and philosopher who had written on The Foundations of Arithmetic, a book that is now widely considered as the foundational text for logicism. His keen interest in the field led him to adopt an increasingly abstract approach, which provoked a lifelong passion for the philosophy of mathematics and logic. Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein by Gustav Klimt, 1905, in Munich, via Neue PinakothekĪs a young man, Ludwig Wittgenstein was mainly interested in engineering and went on to pursue an education in aeronautics. Ludwig, the philosopher, refused his share of the inheritance after his father’s death, and lived a humble (and sometimes harsh) life. One of Wittgenstein’s sisters, Margaret, was immortalized in a painting by Gustav Klimt. The patriarch was a renowned patron of the arts, which led to the household being filled with paintings, sculptures, and often even the artists themselves. Their father, Karl Wittgenstein, was a titan of the steel-industry, set on leaving a legacy through his five sons three of them would end up committing suicide. Ludwig and his siblings were raised in the imposing Palais Wittgenstein in Vienna – the building does not exist anymore, though some pictures of both the exterior and the interior have survived. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into one of Europe’s richest families at the time, the youngest of nine children.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: An Ambivalent Philosopher The music salon of Palais Wittgenstein, 1910, in Vienna, via The Mahler Foundation
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