The bulk of
the papers in this Volume were first presented at the Virginia Tech Philosophy
Department’s 1999 conference on ‘Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy".
They are divided into two sections. The first (‘Biography and Philosophy’)
consists of just two essays -one by Ray Monk and one by James Conant – which
use facts about Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy to highlight certain
difficulties which surround philosophical biography in general. The seven
essays in the second , much larger, section (‘Wittgenstein’) all draw heavily
on recently published letters and diaries with the aim of exploring how various
aspects of Wittgenstein’s life influence his philosophy, and vice versa.

   Both Monk
and Conant are interested in the question of whether or not one should let the
biographical details of any given philosopher influence our reading (and
interpretation) of their work. In his essay ‘Philosophical Biography: The Very
Idea’, Monk defends the idea that the purpose of philosophical biography is to
understand the subject’s thoughts: It is because they fail to become absorbed
in the inner life of their subject, Monk tells us, that Sartre’s biographies of
Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Genet, ultimately fail. However Monk ends with the
further qualifying statement, that in so far as biography is insightful
it is not making a truth claim at all. This view is presented as part and
parcel of Wittgenstein’s pronouncement that in so far as we say anything philosophical
we are not making a truth claim at all. But Monk doesn’t make it obviously
clear why the two should stand or fall together. In his essay ‘Philosophy and
Biography’, Conant (who is more or less sympathetic to Monk’s general outlook on
philosophical biography) defends the idea that philosophical biography is sometimes
possible, and that when it is so, it is a good thing. However he too qualifies
his claim with the further suggestion that philosophical biography is
nevertheless never indispensable to understanding the work of a
philosopher. It is helpful because just as the spirit of a person shows itself
in his philosophy (as Wittgenstein once remarked), so a person’s philosophy can
become clearer to us if we better understand the spirit in which it was
written. But, Conant rightly concludes, philosophical biography is just one
way of reaching such an understanding.

   Kelly
Hamilton’s Essay ‘Wittgenstein and the Mind’s Eye’ takes a look at the ways in
which Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy €“ particularly his conception of the Bild
theory of language in the Tractatus – was shaped by his experience
as a design engineer. Hamilton nicely illustrates various similarities between
the structure of the picture which Wittgenstein lays out in the Tractatus and
various engineering models such as Polhem’s mechanical alphabet used to
describe the various possible combinations in which the parts of a machine can
(in virtue of their forms) stand in relation to each other. Although Hamilton
makes the obvious reference to Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics, from
which Wittgenstein derived a number of ideas, she fails to mention the most
fundamental one, namely that by dissolving conceptual confusions we may come to
eliminate any pseudo€“problem which philosophy presents us with. Nevertheless
she successfully drives home the point just as these engineers used the image
of language as a metaphor for illustrating how machines work, so Wittgenstein
used images from mechanical engineering to picture how the basic structures of
language are related to the basic structures of the world. Of course Hamilton’s
essay cannot be assessed properly without one entering the debate between ‘New’
and ‘Old’ Wittgensteinians as to whether or not Wittgenstein took the
nonsensical propositions of the Tractatus to nevertheless show profound
ineffable truths which cannot be said, but that is a topic for a different
volume altogether.

   As its
title suggests, Louis Sass’ paper ‘Deep Disquietudes: Reflections on
Wittgenstein as an Antiphilosopher’ explores the tensions between the streak in
Wittgenstein that is immensely critical of philosophy (as an activity), and the
streak in which he identifies with those same philosophical inclinations which
at other times he ridicules. Sass begins by arguing that there is a schizoid
aspect to Wittgenstein’s personality, where, unlike ‘schizophrenic’, the term ‘schizoid’
does not imply a psychotic condition, but rather, a ‘general style of character
or personality that may be found to any degree and can be presenting in
well-functioning and reasonably healthy persons. It is a style dominated by a
certain hypersensitivity and vulnerability and by detachment from both self and
world€¦involving certain temperamental or emotional propensities and a distinct
set of characteristic conflicts, concerns, and styles of psychological defense'(p101-2).
However, Wittgenstein was no ordinary schizoid, we are told, but rather one
whose criticism focuses on his own schizoid tendencies, he is, in the author’s
words, ‘the most anti schizoid of schizoids’. Many of Sass’s remarks here ring
true, but the role they play is descriptive, not explanatory;
Sass’s framework provides a neat way of redescribing what we already knew about
Wittgenstein, but it doesn’t carry any new insights about the man, or his work.
Sass ends his essay by appealing to the say/show distinction in an attempt to
show (or is it say?) that ‘showing’ is not an attempt to refer to something
ineffable, but rather pure self-expression: and undivided manifestation
of ‘Being’, and that consequently the answer to our disquietudes about Wittgesntein’s
stance towards philosophy is that ‘at some profound level of his
self-experience, Wittgenstein is transcendental awareness; he is
philosophy’. (p137) My suspicion is that Wittgenstein would dismiss such
remarks as nonsensical. Why not just say that he was fighting a war against a
deep-rooted way of thinking which even he did not always succeed in overcoming?

   As with
much of what is valuable in this volume, Alfred Nordmann’s brief essay ‘The
Sleepy Philosopher: How to Read Wittgenstein’s Diaries’, is mainly composed of
diary entries (some of which are remain unpublished) which Nordmann himself
concludes do not hold any answers. The Wittgenstein scholar would no doubt
prefer to read the complete entries in an uninterrupted form; nonetheless this
is a nicely annotated taster. In ‘Letters from a Philosopher’ Joachim Schulte
takes a fascinating look at a number of very brief letters and postcards
written by Wittgenstein which, at first sight, seem to contain little more than
good wishes or congratulations, addressed to friends or family on special
occasions such as birthdays or Christmas. Here the annotation is necessary, and
Schulte makes a great job of reading between the lines to reveal, not some
great hidden secret, but rather the ceaseless pruning and arranging which
Wittgenstein exposed both his life and his work to, so that ‘only fitting words
were said by him in suitable situations’ (p191). The economy in these brief
letters and postcards is anything but the result of their having been written
in a thoughtless rush.

   ‘Wittgenstein
and Reason’ by Hans-Johann Glock can be divided into two distinct parts. The
first of these offers an invaluable insight into those ideas which Wittgenstein
found in Schopenhauer and Kant, and sought to critically develop. Glock is
particularly good at pointing to Kant’s awareness of a distinction between knowledge
and understanding, and to Schopenhauer’s switch from Kant’s attempts
to draw the limits of human knowledge, to the far more radical attempt
to draw the limits of human discourse. It has little to do with
biography per se, it shows the degree to which one’s reading may
influence one’s life and work, and in so doing, begins to carve a place for
Wittgenstein in the history of ideas. The second half of Glock’s paper
continues this task by looking at Wittgenstein’s interactions with both his
teacher (Russell) and some of his disciples (the Vienna Circle). Once again,
the centre of Glock’s discussion is the spirit of the philosophers in
question,  this time in relation to their attitudes towards politics, and
science.

   The volume
ends with two essays on Wittgenstein’s Jewish background: ‘Wittgenstein and the
Idea of Jewishness’ by Brian McGuinness, and ‘Was Wittgenstein a Jew?’ by David
Stern. Both essays try to make sense of how it is that Wittgenstein could
sometimes make anti-semitic remarks and refer to Jews in the third person, and
on other occasions appear to be self-conscious of his own Jewishness. McGuiness
concludes that Wittgenstein did not think of himself as Jewish, and that
we don’t need to do so either. Stern, whose research is clearly indebted to
that of McGuiness, takes the more cautious (and in my opinion correct) view,
that we would be better off distinguishing between two different senses of the
term ‘Jew’, and that though there is no doubt that Wittgesntein was (and
thought of himself as being) of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was
not (and did not consider himself to be) a practicing Jew.

   So ends a
volume that will no doubt be of interest to the Wittgesntein enthusiast,
though, depending on how much secondary literature she has already read, she
will have to pick and chose to varying degrees between what she already knows,
and what she will find novel.

© 2005 Constantine
Sandis

Constantine Sandis
is about to submit his PhD on The Things we Do and Why we Do Them at the
University of Reading. He also teaches in the Philosophy Department there, as
well as at the University of Bath (Division of Lifelong-Learning), and for the
Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Categories: Philosophical