He found friendship and even elementary courtesies difficult unless there was a total identity of philosophical ideals. In later life he was a practising but ashamed homosexual, and for this and other reasons often felt ‘indecent’ and suicidal. He feared madness and was frequently uncertain about the value of philosophy: he gave it up altogether for a few years after the First World War and taught for six years at elementary schools in backward rural areas of Austria. There was within him an immense tension between logic and mysticism. He was torn between his need for solitude (he stayed frequently and for long periods in a remote area of Norway and, towards the end of his life, of Ireland) and his need for philosophical discussion. Wittgenstein was a tortured and difficult man: intense, introspective, uncompromising, ruthlessly honest with himself and with others. Monk writes beautifully, and he sets out the intellectual processes with the utmost clarity but an additional and very special merit of this book is the skillful inter-weaving of Wittgenstein’s thought and his personality. Its 650 pages are of course anything but compressed, and allow us to understand how Wittgenstein arrived at his conclusions. When he sent the manuscript of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, neither of these considerable intellects could understand it (which didn’t stop Russell from writing a foreword when it was eventually published.) So amateur students of philosophy like your reviewer might be excused for having had only a very imperfect grasp of his ideas, and indeed for having found books about Wittgenstein very hard work – until, that is, the appearance of Ray Monk’s magnificent biography. He would then struggle for ages rearranging the notes, and was never really satisfied that they were ready for publication.

He was always unhappy about committing his ideas to paper, and when he did so, he would set them down in a highly compressed form as numbered notes, sometimes in the form of aphorisms.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings are very difficult, not only in content but also in presentation. Vintage Paperback edition 1991, 654 pp., £9.99 and Bruce Duffy – The World As I Found It. Ray Monk – Ludwig Wittgenstein – The Duty of Genius. SUBSCRIBE NOW Books Wittgenstein Books Reviewed by Ralph Blumenau.

Ludwig wittgenstein the duty of genius