Yet if the Wittgensteins were among the most cultivated and privileged of families, they were far from the most cheerful. Hermine, the oldest child, never married and became increasingly depressed and reclusive as she grew older; Gretl, the most intelligent, most adventurous daughter -- immortalized in a painting by Klimt that now hangs in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich -- entered into a disastrous marriage with an impoverished American who turned out to be a paranoid hysteric, is rumored to have consulted Freud about her frigidity, and spent most of her life searching restlessly for a cause or project to devote her energies to. Nor were the sons any happier.

Hans, the eldest boy -- a prodigy in both music and mathematics, who translated the world into mathematical formulae from an early age and mastered the violin, piano, and organ to such a degree that Mahler's teacher proclaimed him a genius -- disappeared during a trip to America at the age of twenty-four, a presumed suicide, after a protracted struggle with his father: Karl had insisted, despite Hans's obvious unsuitedness for such a career, that his firstborn son go into business rather than pursue his passion for music. Rudolf, the third son, entered a restaurant in Berlin, where he was studying chemistry (probably at his father's insistence -- his real interests were music and theater), asked the pianist to play a melancholy song that was fashionable at the time, ordered two glasses of milk, emptied the contents of a packet of cyanide into one of them, and drank it. Kurt, the second son, who had always seemed the most cheerful (and least gifted) of the brothers, shot himself in the final weeks of the First World War -- perhaps because he feared a court-martial after disobeying an order to send his men into a battle that was already lost.

The Wittgensteins' youngest son, too, contemplated suicide "continually," as he told a friend when he was twenty-three; he was, he said, ashamed of lacking the courage to end his life. Instead, Ludwig Wittgenstein went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, revolutionizing philosophy not once but twice: first, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus -- the only book he published in his lifetime -- by applying rigorous logical techniques to the question of language's relationship to reality and truth, while insisting on the limits of what descriptive language could express (a matter of ethics as much as logic, with, in the final section of the book, mystical overtones); then, in unpublished lectures circulated by his students in samizdat versions, by subverting all the received wisdom about language and thought through an anti-essentialist, anti-dogmatic view of how language functioned in "the stream of life."

As a student at Cambridge in the period just before the First World War, he was hailed by Bertrand Russell as "perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating." (John Maynard Keynes, who also met him at this time, referred to him as "God.") In his later years, his own students at Cambridge aped his mannerisms and regarded it as a privilege to be subjected to his scathing critiques. Since his death in 1951, he has increasingly become a legendary figure even to many who have never read him, in large part because of his ferocious life-long quest for moral purity.

He enlisted in the Austrian army during the First World War, though he was convinced that the Allies would win, and volunteered for the most dangerous postings; when captured by the Italians, he indignantly refused to let his family use their connections to have him released from the prisoner-of-war camp. On returning to civilian life, he gave up his entire share of the fortune his father had bequeathed to the surviving children and for the rest of his life owned virtually nothing. He spent six years teaching elementary school in poor villages in the mountains of Austria, worked as an assistant gardener in a monastery, and was only reluctantly persuaded to return to Cambridge to teach. During the Second World War, he quit his academic post and served as a porter in a London hospital, where he fervently sought to preserve his anonymity.

This fascinates me; it is my opinion that Wittgenstein was not, in fact, a genius, but a raving neurotic. His linguistic philosophy was unmanageable and unproductive, and a burden on the minds of his readers. It does not surprise me that he was the scion of a top-heavy, fabulously well-to-do family, nor that he did not handle it well.


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