The German Genius

would have produced Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he did, or that it would have had quite the tone it did. 19
    Wittgenstein enlisted on August 7, the day after the Austrian declaration of war on Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front. He later suggested that he felt the experience of facing death would, in some indefinable manner, “improve” him. On the first sight of the opposing forces, he confided in a letter: “Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I am standing eye to eye with death.”
    Wittgenstein was twenty-five when war broke out. His large family was Jewish, wealthy, perfectly assimilated into Viennese society. Franz Grillparzer was a friend of Ludwig’s father, and Brahms gave piano lessons to both his mother and his aunt. The Wittgensteins’ musical evenings were well known in Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter were both regulars, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet received its first performance there. Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s sister, sat for Gustav Klimt.
    Ludwig was as fond of music as the rest of the family, but he was also the most technical and practical-minded. As a result, he wasn’t sent to the Gymnasium in Vienna but to a Realschule in Linz, a school chiefly known for the teaching of the history master, Leopold Pötsch, a rabid right-winger who regarded the Hapsburg dynasty as “degenerate.” There is no sign that Wittgenstein was ever attracted by Pötsch’s theories, but a fellow pupil with whom he overlapped for a few months certainly was. His name was Adolf Hitler.
    After Linz, Wittgenstein went to Berlin, where he became interested in philosophy. He also developed a fascination with aeronautics, and his father suggested he go to the University of Manchester in England, where there was an excellent engineering department. There he was introduced to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics . This book showed, or attempted to show, that mathematics and logic are the same, and for Wittgenstein the book was a revelation. He spent months studying the Principles and also Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik ( Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic ). In the summer of 1911 Wittgenstein visited Frege in Jena, and Frege was impressed enough by the young Austrian to recommend he study under Russell at Cambridge. 20
    Wittgenstein arrived there later in 1911, and by 1914 Luki, as he was called by then, began to form his own theory of logic. But, in the long vacation, he went home to Vienna, war was declared, and he was trapped. He proved brave in the fighting, was promoted three times, was decorated, but in 1918 was taken prisoner in Italy with half a million other soldiers. While incarcerated in a concentration camp, he concluded that the book he had just finished, during a period of leave, had “solved all the outstanding problems in philosophy” and that he would give up the discipline after the war and become a schoolteacher. He also decided to give away his fortune. He was as good as his word on both counts.
    Wittgenstein had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book, which did not appear in English until 1922. But when it did appear, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus created a sensation. 21 Many people did not understand it; others thought it stated the obvious. Maynard Keynes wrote to Wittgenstein, “Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge.” In Vienna, it attracted the attention of the philosophers led by Moritz Schlick—a group that eventually evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Frege, whose own work had inspired the Tractatus , died without ever understanding it. 22
    Wittgenstein’s major innovation was to realize that language has limitations, that there are certain things it cannot do and that these have logical and therefore philosophical consequences. Wittgenstein argues that it is pointless to talk about value—simply because “value is not part of the world.” It therefore follows that all judgments about moral and aesthetic matters cannot—ever—be meaningful uses of language. The same is true of philosophical generalizations that we make about the world as a whole. They are meaningless if they cannot be broken down into elementary sentences “which really are pictures” of part of our world. Instead, we have to lower our sights, says Wittgenstein, if we are to make sense. The world can only be spoken about by