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Editorial Review Product Description
Ludwig Wittgenstein is universally recognized as one of the most original and influential philosophers of his age and as a personality of great magnetism and power. Not all who recognize his importance admire him or approve of it; his life and work are both surrounded by controversy. In this welcome reissue of his classic biographical study, complete with a brand-new Preface, Brian McGuinness traces the early years of this fascinating figure and examines the formative influences which shaped his extraordinary life. ... Read more Customer Reviews (3) 
A Welcome Look into the Life and Times of a Great Thinker
A good book on the early Wittgenstein (covering the period through the writing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a useful analytical exposition of that work), this book is heavy on personal detail and, unfortunately, rather ponderously written. Nevertheless, for those who are fascinated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially his oft-forgotten and frequently misunderstood early philosophy, this is a valuable work.
McGuinness, a scholarly philosopher himself, and acknowledged expert on the Tractatus, traces the young Ludwig's progress from birth to home schooling and, later, to his school days beyond the home (after his father, Karl, had concluded that the two younger Wittgenstein sons, Paul and Ludwig, had not benefitted sufficiently from in-house tutors).
In fact, we learn from this work that the young Ludwig actually was a school mate in Linz, Austria, of the boy, Adolf Hitler, and that the two may have known each other. (Elsewhere it's been suggested, albeit with little supporting evidence, that Hitler may have had Wittgenstein in mind when he wrote about a Jewish boy, years later, who was the source of his anti-Semitism. Wittgenstein, of course, was actually raised Catholic but his family was two thirds Jewish, hailing originally from Germany before settling in Austria.)
After an extensive and insightful look inside the wealthy Wittgenstein home and lifestyle, we follow the biography's principal on to England and his early exposure to philosophy as a young areonautical engineering student seeking to find his own way. After studying engineering in Manchester, he finally seeks out one of the premier philosophers in England of his day, Bertrand Russell, a logician working on the logical underpinnings of mathematics and on refining logic itself in hopes of providing a more scientifically oriented language in which to formulate and cast our knowledge claims. Russell is in correspondence with Gottlob Frege, a German logician pursuing a similar project, and it may have been Frege, McGuinness suggests, who directed Wittgenstein to the English don.
Russell, after some initial misgivings takes on his young "German" (based on the written record, it seems to have been a while before he realized Wittgenstein was, in fact, Austrian, not German) and is soon grooming him to carry on his work. But Wittgenstein, young and aggressively opinionated is also a very high strung personality and the two have a rocky time of it.
Under Russell's tutelage, Wittgenstein undertakes to complete the effort begun by Russell as McGuinness amply documents through Russell's written comments to his lover at the time, Lady Ottoline, and through Rusell's later autobiographical writings. Following Russell and Frege, the young Wittgenstein is obsessed with finding a way to understand everything within a logical framework, including what he comes to conclude must be grasped but which necessarily lies beyond the possibilities of logical expression. To reach that point, Wittgenstein sees it as his project to sketch out the boundaries of what can be said in any sensible way (the extent to which logic can be invoked) and so sets out to explore and define the limits of logic itself.
McGuinness is especially good at finding and recounting a multiplicity of early recollections of Wittgenstein from his famous and not so famous contemporaries including Cambridge scholar and philosopher G. E. Moore, economist John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and others. The accounts sometimes include interesting, if rather snitty, references to the youngish disciple of Russell, as when Strachey alternately refers to him as the "witter-gitter man" or "herr sinckel-winckle," revealing, through such references, his sense of his own self-importance. Nevertheless, Strachey and his colleagues were apparently more than eager to induct Wittgenstein into their elite circle, the so-called Apostles, though Russell advises them against it because of Wittgenstein's temperament. (Russell is ultimately proved right when Wittgenstein seeks to withdraw almost immediately after being accepted and a compromise must be worked out to spare the Apostles the indignity of being rejected by him.)
The death of Wittgenstein's industrialist father and World War I intervene with Wittgenstein back in Vienna for a visit. The young man promptly decides to volunteer to fight for his country but rapidly discovers that he is ill at ease among common soldiers who, he finds, too coarse to be endured. And yet he learns to endure them and gradually comes to be recognized by his superiors, if not his fellows, for his education and talents, rising to become a low level officer in the Austrian army shortly before the war ends (he had entered as an enlisted man) and being decorated several times for valor before finally falling into the hands of the Italian army as a prisoner of war -- as the war winds down.
During the war years, he continued to keep careful notes and to do philosophy by thinking through the various logical problems he had discovered through Russell and Frege and some time between the later fighting and his period as a prisoner of war, he completed his small book laying out his logic-based vision of how what we could say must fit with what there is, that is, how language fits with the world. In the process he determined that there were things we could say (propositions about the world that could be either true or false) and things we could only show, logical statements which reveal in their form something about what we can say but which, themselves, say nothing. Sending his manuscript around in post-war Austria he struggled to get it published but with little success.
It took his old friend and mentor, Russell, to arrange for translation and publication into English (though a less satisfactory German edition was published in Germany to Wittgenstein's dismay). McGuinness' book ends with a summary reading of the points to be found in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (a book which got its rather cumbersome name from one of Wittggenstein's old colleagues, G. E. Moore, at Cambridge), with McGuinness' promise of another volume to come dealing with Wittgenstein's subsequent development.
As those with a familiarity with Wittgenstein will know, the young man who wrote the Tractatus (his only book published in his lifetime) believed that, with its completion, he had answered all possible philosophical questions and so went on to what he seems to have expected would be a modest life, earning his living as an elementary school teacher. But his experiences in the non-intellectual world he found in a number of small Austrian villages and, later, through a series of encounters with a group of Viennese philosophers dubbed the logical positivists of the so-called Vienna Circle, who came to consider his Tractatus a seminal work, he was drawn back to philosophy.
Returning to Cambridge to teach in 1929, he moved increasingly away from his earlier way of thinking and recast his whole understanding of language and how it fits with the world. (From a picture theory as presented in the Tractatus, he moved toward a view of language that saw it as embedded in the world and we, its speakers, embedded in it, introducing a slew of new and important and influential new philosophical concepts including "language games", "forms of life", "private language," meaning as use, etc. At the same time he became seminal in an entirely new way of doing philosophy, the method that came to be called linguistic analysis or ordinary language philosophy.)
The new thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein found expression in various unpublished volumes, sometimes reflecting the notes taken by his students (e.g., The Blue and Brown Books) and, finally, in the Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition which he prepared for publication but had not completed at the time of his death. After he died, other material he had written was discovered and published (On Certainty, Remarks on Colour, Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, and Culture and Value), leading to the recognition of a Wittgensteinian philosophy that was miles apart from the influential work he had done in his early days.
For an especially good biographical picture of Wittgenstein's full career, the interested reader should try Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.
(Another rather interesting book on the man and his ideas can be found in Wittgenstein's Poker: The story of a Ten Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers which captures the one and only meeting between Wittgenstein, by now in his later years, and the upstart Austrian expatriate philosopher Karl Popper* who had spent the Second World War teaching in New Zealand and who ultimately found his way to England. Popper had made it his life's work to challenge and overcome the Vienna Circle's logical positivists, among whom he mistakenly counted Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein's Poker documents the sparks that flew when the two met that one time and clashed over their competing ideas about philosophy.)
Presented with great detail and erudition, Young Ludwig by Brian McGuinness is a substantial tome and a useful edition to the books on the life and thought of one of the twentieth century's most important philosophical thinkers.
SWM
* Mentor of George Soros, among other claims to fame.
New Edition of Prize-winning Biography
Professor McGuinness' Young Ludwig (1988) was the first thoroughly researched and in-depth life history of the philosopher. Over fifteen years passed and the text eventually went out of print. Oxford decided to launch a second edition, with a new preface by McGuinness, enabling the work to be read by a new generation of readers interested in the rich culture and family that contributed to Wittgenstein's thought and the creation of the Tractatus. In fact, the last chapter of the book is devoted entirely to the Tractatus, which to a large extent sheds new light on this often-misunderstood philosophical text.
McGuinness spent many years researching and composing this biography. He travelled throughout Europe, Israel and America, studying countless manuscripts and correspondence, interviewing family and individuals that knew the philosopher, many of whom, unfortunately, have passed on.
This is a detailed analysis of Wittgenstein, painting a rich cultural picture of pre-WW1 Vienna. Wittgenstein's father, Karl, was an extraordinary man in his own right, a capitalist of ingenious talent, creating an empire of extreme wealth and prestige. A creative and forceful personality, similar to his youngest son, along with his wife, was at the centre of the thriving music and art scene in Vienna, where Brahms, Mahler, and Klimt were frequent guests at the house for musical evenings and group discussions on literature, culture and politics. Karl Wittgenstein wrote many economic articles for major publications in Vienna and Germany that continue to be read by historians today.
The family, however, experienced tragedy, with three of Karl's oldest sons committing suicide. Ludwig often considered ending his own life, but experienced a spiritual transformation after WW1, (As many young men who survived experienced after the war) was awarded medals for bravery and ended up a prisoner of war in an Italian camp. It is in this camp that Wittgenstein wrote the finishing touches, from the copious notebooks written during the war, of his only published philosophical treatise, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The biography describes the philosopher's war experiences, his time as a prisoner of war and his eventual return to Vienna, where he gave away his massive inheritance, attempted to publish his book, attended teachers college to instruct elementary school and became a gardener for a Catholic monastery.
Unfortunately, the biography ends in 1921, a year before the first publication of the English translation of the Tractutas. I believe in the "philosophical biography" as it can present the family and cultural influences on the philosopher, revealing better insight into the particular ideas and thought processes of that philosopher.
This is a prize winning biography giving the reader greater insight into a unique and extraordinary human being.
Glad to see this classic reissued
It's good to see Brian McGuinness's biography of the first half of Ludwig Wittgenstein's life back in print.There are other worthwhile books on Wittgenstein's life and thought, but none is a substitute for this book.
"Young Ludwig" is the result of years of McGuinness' own research.It draws on his personal discussions and correspondence with members of Wittgenstein's family and friends during which, he tells us in a new preface, he was "reconstructing Wittgenstein's life along with them."This biography shows that he also meticulously tracked down a wide variety of acquaintances and people who had crossed paths with Wittgenstein and Russell.He seems to have ferretted out an amazing variety of documents and other scattered scraps of evidence from unusual places as well as from the usual kinds of sources.The book is densely detailed; even people who know a lot about Wittgenstein from other sources will learn new things about him and his times from this book.(I know this because of the "Really -- I didn't know that!" reactions I often get when mentioning things I've learned from this book to fellow philosophers.)
The book also benefits from McGuinness' role as a philosopher.He has authored many papers on Wittgenstein's philosophy (some recently collected in Approaches to Wittgenstein (Routledge 2002)) and edited anthologies related to it.Young Ludwig exhibits McGuinness' intimate acquaintance with Wittgenstein's intellectual interests and philosophical endeavors during his early years.Along with another Oxford philosopher (David Pears), McGuinness produced a new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.In that related project, his philosophical work was accompanied by substantial historical research: he located, scrutinized, and tried to date and order such manuscripts as could be discovered of Wittgenstein's previous attempts at the work.He dug up and edited and/or translated many works related to Wittgenstein's life and work previously unavailable in English:essays on political economy by Karl Wittgenstein (Ludwig's father),popular scientific essays by Ludwig Boltzmann (whom Ludwig admired and wanted to study physics with), and many, many others.Thus, his work on Wittgenstein scholarship is monumental:writing about Wittgenstein involved establishing a whole collection of sources related to his life and work.
I also happen to like this book a lot.I personally prefer the kind of biography McGuinness has written. You read it slowly, lingering over the groupings of artifacts and remembrances he has brought together and leads you through as a patient guide.You begin to realize how vast the collection is, how much there is to be put together.He does not tell you what to make of everything --- although (as he put it in the preface to the first edition) he does attempt to present Wittgenstein's life "as something capable of being seen as a unity".He pauses at times to address the reader on the significance of a certain detail, on the ambiguities involved in the craft of biography and on more general conundrums involved in making sense of another human being.He tells us not only about his subject, but how he came to know his subject, generously sharing his finds with the reader.It is somehow extremely scholarly and humbly personal at the same time.I like his style because it allows the reader some mental freedom to develop his or her own picture of things from what is known.McGuinness tells us in the new preface that his interest "is not in causes but in effects, in seeing how Wittgenstein (the young Wittgenstein, in this volume) lived out the situation he was in."You will want to have this book for the sheer amount of information it contains (it has an index, too), regardless of your taste in biographical style.
When this book was out of print, I snapped up used copies to loan to students and colleagues. (I would not part with my own.) Now I can tell them what I would tell anyone interested in Wittgenstein's life or early analytic philosophy:we are very fortunate to have this labor of love available to us, and in an affordable edition, too --- how great that now anyone can go get a copy!
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Minor work by our greatest psychologist