A young man from a fabulously wealthy and cultivated Viennese family arrives in Cambridge, in 1911, to study with Bertrand Russell, the preëminent logician of his age. How many people in the history of philosophy are the subject of a two-volume tome of anecdotes? What explains the fascination with the ephemera of one man’s life, including among people who claim that the work was the thing?Įven for those who know the facts of that life well, “the difficulty has been to discern in them an intelligible human being,” as a reviewer of Ray Monk’s definitive biography, “ Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,” from 1990, wrote. Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, in that seemingly everybody who met him felt moved to record the encounter.

But he has not been afforded the cloak of impersonality that shrouds most analytic philosophers. He was one of the founders of a tradition-the “analytic”-that has come to dominate academic philosophy in much of the world. There is only one canonical philosopher of the twentieth century with anything resembling these traits: Ludwig Wittgenstein. What was it like to be in the presence of someone who believed such things? The just man is happier than the unjust man, even when he is being tortured on the rack. It is worse to do wrong than to be wronged. No one can really desire what’s bad, he said. He was also queer in how he managed to combine rationality with the most abject unreasonableness. The Greek word often applied to him was atopos, literally, “out of place.” His out-of-placeness consisted in what the scholar Martha Nussbaum has called a “deeper impenetrability of spirit.” Socrates simply could not be counted on to say what one expected him to say.

Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk