BOOKS
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drowning in the Chesapeake and one by poison in Berlin) and with trenchant
and irrefutable mockery by Karl Kraus of the bloated self-image and
festering bureaucracy of the aging Hapsburg Empire. How wonderfully
different Cambridge was - a place to work, even ifhe could not be at home
there.
This biography portrays the young man by placing him in a series of
broad contexts: family,
Austria,fin-de-siecle
Vienna, Linz (where Wittgen–
stein was in the same school as Hitler for a year), capitalism and monarchy,
Manchester and aeronautic engineering, World War One, Cambridge,
Bloomsbury - and of course the problems of logic and philosophy. Just as
Wittgenstein emerges through his relations and interactions with the people
who constitute these various worlds, so too these different contexts emerge
with clarity and character as McGuinness describes their impact on Wittgen–
stein. Perhaps the most surprising details concern World War One, in which
Wittgenstein found a combination of physical danger, menial service, and
religious mysticism that profoundly altered his way oflife. Throughout the
focus remains steadfastly on the man - the development of his aims and of
his standards of success, what other people contributed to this development,
and the agonies that arose through his sensitivity to the incompleteness of his
achievements in both his public (philosophical) and private (moral and reli–
gious) life.
The simultaneous attention to both context and detail is superb and
corresponds to a main thrust ofWittgenstein's philosophical lessons. Wittgen–
stein's breakthroughs in philosophy always came by paying attention to
details. The main breakthroughs concerned the relation oflanguage to our
thinking. At the time of his early work, just after the astonishing revitalization
of formal logic by Frege, Whitehead, and Russell, Wittgenstein was convinced
that the answer would have to be found through discovering how logic is
possible. So he looked very closely at the work of Frege and Russell on the
foundation oflogic, in search of the secret of the queer sentences oflogic:
TLP
5.511: How can logic - all-embl·acing logic, which mirrors the
world - use such peculiar crotchets and contrivances? Only because
they al·e all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network,
the great mirror.
Having denied himself generalizations, Wittgenstein falls back on con–
text (here a system or network). One can never
say
what significance the
details have, but one can
show
it by presenting them in context.
Two lines of dissatisfaction have emerged in earlier reviews of this
