Anthony Gottlieb studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge and was Executive Editor of The Economist from 1997 to 2006. A former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of the acclaimed histories The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment. In this interview, Gottlieb discusses his new biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, exploring Wittgenstein’s extraordinary family background, the cultural world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and his radical rethinking of the nature and limits of philosophy.
What is your new book about?
It’s a compact biography of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing on his family background, his somewhat paradoxical personality, the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and his radical ideas about the nature of philosophy.
His family was remarkable: he was not even the most famous member of it during his lifetime, except in the tiny world of academic philosophy. The better-known Wittgensteins were, first of all, Ludwig’s father, Karl, “the Carnegie of Austria,” who regularly featured in the European, British, and American business press, and later one of Ludwig’s brothers, Paul, who was an internationally renowned concert pianist who lost his right arm and played with one hand.
After Ludwig’s death in 1951, he came to overshadow his father and Paul and was regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. This was above all because of his idea that philosophical problems, though not trivial, are in some sense illusory. These important pseudo-problems, he argued, are generated by mistakes we make about the nature of language. Although his views on language changed significantly, he always maintained that philosophical puzzles arise from some sort of linguistic confusion. And it was his focus on language that was largely responsible for the central place that language occupied in philosophy for quite a lot of the last century.
Why did you want to write this book?
Plenty of new material has emerged since the publication of the two major biographies of Wittgenstein, which came out almost four decades ago—Brian McGuinness’s in 1988 on Wittgenstein’s early life, and Ray Monk’s in 1990 on all of it. We now have, for example, the large correspondence between Wittgenstein and his last love, Ben Richards, which was embargoed until 2020; diaries (by Wittgenstein and others); students’ notes and memoirs; and other letters and documents that fill in various gaps. Perhaps just as important is the research that has been done (much of it in German) on some of Ludwig’s siblings and their family history, as well as on the business career and ideas of their father, Karl. All this helps us to see Ludwig in a fuller light. And I think it is easier to take a measured view of his achievement and nature at this greater distance from him and his disciples.
So it was time for a fresh look at Wittgenstein. But I also had personal reasons for wanting to write about him. My boyhood hero was Bertrand Russell, who fostered Wittgenstein’s philosophical career, and it was because they had both been at Cambridge that I wanted to study there. Some of his former pupils were still teaching in Cambridge when I arrived. I’ve been pondering him for a long time now, and especially his views about the nature of philosophy. Also, my father was from Vienna, and he often talked about it, which partly sparked my interest in Wittgenstein’s cultural milieu.
What topics do you discuss in the book, and why do you discuss them?
There is more in the book about Wittgenstein’s views on the general nature of philosophy than on his treatments of particular topics. In other words, more metaphilosophy than philosophy. I’m particularly interested in how Wittgenstein’s ideas grew out of nineteenth-century debates about the changing relation between science and philosophy, and especially the question of what there is left for philosophy to do.
I think this topic is connected, in Wittgenstein’s case, with another matter: his complex relation to his father. Ludwig strikingly said, more than once, that he was a businessman like his father, in the sense that he wanted to get something done—to get results. The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who had a great influence on the young Ludwig, argued that one of the few useful things philosophy could still do was to help clear a path for the advance of science by exposing the muddles that philosophers had got into. I think that Ludwig seized on one part of this—namely, the exposing of muddles—and made it his life’s work. That was his business; his way of getting things done. He parted ways with Boltzmann, though, over the status of science. Ludwig was violently opposed to the idea that philosophy should be merely an underlabourer serving the aims of science. He thought that philosophy had its own aim: the clarification of our ideas, which was an end in itself. Like some other Viennese intellectuals, especially Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger, Wittgenstein abhorred the rise of scientific and technological culture. He felt they were displacing the more valuable pursuits of literature and the arts, to the detriment of humanity. This put him in certain respects at odds with his father, who lauded the rise of machines and industry as the way forward for mankind—though Ludwig seems never to have overtly criticised Karl.
Another recurring theme in my book is music. The Wittgenstein family were obsessed with it: if they were not performing or listening to it, they were talking about performances they had heard. Ludwig and one of his sisters said that their mother could communicate with her children only via music. She could bring a thought to completion only at the piano, not in words, according to Ludwig. So it is hardly surprising, I suggest, that the notion of the limits of language looms large in Ludwig’s early work. He grew up on a diet of the verbally inexpressible.
What most surprised you when researching this book?
One thing about the Wittgenstein family history came as a surprise. Although Ludwig’s paternal grandparents converted from Judaism to Protestant Christianity, as was well known from the time of the first biographies, it turns out that they were married as Jews and (more importantly) were not disconnected from the Jewish community as the later generations of Wittgensteins made out. The family of Ludwig’s paternal grandmother, the Figdors, who remained Jewish, was much grander and richer than the Wittgensteins then were. The economic rise of the Wittgensteins was in no small part due to the fact that Hermann Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s paternal grandfather, went into business with the Jewish Figdors. And the Wittgensteins’ grandest musical connections, such as their friendship with Brahms, came via the Figdors. Yet by the time of Ludwig’s generation, the family distanced itself from Jews and regularly indulged in a snobbish variety of antisemitism.
From delving more into Ludwig’s family, I came to appreciate that he was, in certain respects, not quite as sui generis as he appears when you consider him in isolation. Even one of the apparently most distinctive things about the way Ludwig spoke and wrote, preferring vivid similes to literal statements, turns out to be just the way that he and his siblings spoke to one another at home. More importantly, the commanding, self-assured, aristocratic manner that led him to believe, at an early age, that he could see how to resolve all philosophical problems was a family trait. The Wittgensteins always did things their own way, be it in business, in music, or in philosophy, and never mind the rules that others lived by. Although it is widely known that Ludwig gave away his immense inherited fortune, I think people tend not to appreciate how little this changed him. He never altogether shook off the family’s profound sense of its own superiority.
What effect do you hope your book will have?
Elizabeth Anscombe, a friend of Wittgenstein’s and the translator of most of his later writings, urged people to regard his output as a work in progress, not a finished product. He was constantly changing his mind and developing his thoughts. I think Anscombe’s view on this is true and important, and it’s unfortunately been disregarded. Many publications that appear to be books by Wittgenstein and are treated as if they present his stable and settled views are, in fact, selections from various jottings that record his thoughts as they pass through his mind. This is particularly true of Culture and Value, which I think is quite widely read, because it is non-technical. There are some striking thoughts in it, but you never know if he still agreed with them an hour after he wrote them down. Something similar is true of his conversation. Several pupils inscribed and published a lot of his table-talk. The trouble with this is that he was habitually vehement, volatile, and unguarded: he was always making throwaway remarks which his devoted acolytes could not bring themselves to throw away. One thing I hope readers will take from my book is greater caution in interpreting Wittgenstein’s writings and talk.
Another is an appreciation of his inner turbulence. I see Wittgenstein as a confluence of conflicting impulses that make him strikingly resistant to accurate description. Formulate almost any straightforward generalization about him, and you will eventually find a counterexample to it. I hope that readers of my book will come away with a sense of the unusual complexity of Wittgenstein’s nature, and that they find him as fascinating as I did.
Anthony Gottlieb
Anthony Gottlieb studied philosophy at Cambridge University and worked at The Economist, of which he was Executive Editor from 1997 to 2006. A former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times and New York Review of Books. He now focuses on the history of philosophy and is the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance and The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
