Erbacher (ed.

)
Friedrich August von Hayek’s Draft Biography
of Ludwig Wittgenstein
 Christian Erbacher (ed.)

Friedrich August von Hayek’s

Draft Biography of Ludwig
Wittgenstein
The Text and its History
Afterword by Allan Janik

mentis
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Cover: The cover uses a picture of the first page of Hayek’s draft biography in the version
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(WWA). The picture was taken by Bernt Österman, curator of the WWA, and has been
reproduced with his permission.

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ............................. 7

Christian Erbacher
The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published ... 9
Editorial Note .......................................... 27

Friedrich August von Hayek

Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein . . . . . . 28

Allan Janik
Family Relationships and Family Resemblances: Hayek and Wittgenstein
An Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Preface and Acknowledgements

This volume publishes for the first time Friedrich August von Hayek’s draft for a
biographical sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Having compiled the draft in 1953,
Hayek was among the first who systematically collected biographical information
about Wittgenstein. He planned to publish his sketch, but Wittgenstein’s sister as
well as his friends and literary executors resented the idea and stopped him to
further elaborate the text. The intellectual history of the sketch is elaborated in the
introduction.
The text of Hayek’s fragment is reproduced and edited with permission from
the Estate of F. A. von Hayek. The physical copy that is edited here is deposited
at The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA).
It has been found and investigated during the research project »Joint Nordic Use of
WAB Bergen and VWA Helsinki« funded by Nordforsk in 2010. Further research on
the material has been conducted during the research project »Shaping a Domain
of Knowledge by Editorial Processing: the Case of Wittgenstein’s Work« that was
funded by the Norwegian Research Council in 2012 –2015. The final editorial work
and preparation of the manuscript has been conducted within the DFG Collabora-
tive Research Center »Media of Cooperation« (SFB TP 01, Wissenschaftliche Medien
der Praxistheorie: Harold Garfinkel und Ludwig Wittgenstein). Bernt Österman, as
curator of WWA, granted permission to use the picture of the first page of Hayek’s
draft for the book cover.
The introduction is a revised and translated version of an article that has first
been published as: Erbacher, C., 2015. »Friedrich August von Hayeks unvollendete
›Skizze für eine Biographie von Ludwig Wittgenstein‹«. Mitteilungen aus dem Bren-
ner-Archiv, 34, 83 –100. I am especially thankful to Ingrid Hänsel for allowing me to
quote from Ludwig Hänsel’s letters, and to Pierre Stonborough for permission to
quote from Margaret Stonborough’s letters. I thank Anita and Benedict von Wright
for permitting me to quote passages from letters by Georg Henrik von Wright. Peg
Rhees gave permission to quote from letters by Rush Rhees. Sadly she passed away
during preparation of early versions of the text. I am thankful to Volker Munz for
renewing the permission. Letters by Friedrich August von Hayek are quoted with
permission from the Estate of F. A. von Hayek. In the introduction, transcription
of letters has been normalized, that is handwritten additions or corrections have
been carried out without editorial explication. I am indebted to WWA and the
Finnish National Library for providing access to their holdings. The Department
of Philosophy at the University of Bergen and the Wittgenstein Archives at the
University of Bergen supported the here presented work by providing access to
their research resources and infrastructure. For commenting on earlier versions of
the text, I wish to thank especially Allan Janik, Bernt Österman, Ilse Somavilla and
8 Preface and Acknowledgements

Anton Unterkircher, and for revisions of the penultimate version Marjorie Perloff.
For help in preparing the translation I thank Tina Schirmer and Arlyne Moi. Julia
Jung and Anne dos Santos Reis contributed indispensable help during all stages of
the editorial process; I thank them for their tireless efforts. Radmila Schweitzer,
Secretary General of the Wittgenstein Initiative Wien, I thank for inciting me to
make Hayek’s fragment eventually available in print.

Christian Erbacher
Siegen and Cölbe, July 2019
Christian Erbacher

The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never

been published

1. Wittgenstein and Hayek

At first sight, the life trajectories of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 –1951) and Friedrich
August von Hayek (1899 –1992) show remarkable parallels: both of these Viennese
thinkers served in the Austrian army during the First World War; both emigrated
to England in the 1930s and became British citizens when Hitler annexed Austria in
1938; both were to become major intellectual figures who transformed their fields
of study. A closer look, however, reveals considerable differences in the two men,
in their upbringing, their war-experiences and their intellectual careers after the
war.
Hayek and Wittgenstein were distantly related: Hayek’s great grandfather and
Wittgenstein’s grandmother had been siblings, making the two men remote cousins.
But in this era, when a family of ten children was not uncommon, this relationship
was not especially significant. Hayek and Wittgenstein had met occasionally during
vacations or family visits, but there was no real friendship (Hayek 1992: 177). Then,
too, although Hayek’s family was quite well off, their way of life could not compare
to that of the Wittgensteins, one of the wealthiest families in the Austrian Empire,
whose Palais welcomed such guests as Johannes Brahms and Josef Labor. Still, the
casual acquaintance between Hayek and Wittgenstein was enough to enable them
to recognize one another on the train to the Italian Front in the late summer of 1918,
as Hayek remembered:
My first recollection goes back to a day on furlough and leave of absence from the
front, where on the railway station in Bad Ischl, [Austria], two young ensigns in
the artillery in uniform looked at each other and said, »You have a fairly familiar
face.« Then we asked each other »Aren’t you a Wittgenstein?« and »Aren’t you
a Hayek?« I now know that at this moment returning to the front, he must have
had the manuscript of the Tractatus in his rucksack. But I didn’t know it at that
time. But many of the mental characteristics of the man were already present as I
gathered in this night journey from Bad Ischl to Innsbruck, where the occasion was
his contempt for the noisy crowd of returning young officers, half-drunk; a certain
contempt for the world. (Hayek 1983: 251) 1
During the train ride the two men conversed, but they did not have intellectual
discussions. Hayek knew nothing about Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing before

1 A similar recollection is published in Hayek (1977).

10 Christian Erbacher

the publication of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus in 1921 (Hayek 1983: 254). And
this fact points to yet another major difference between the two men: when they
met in the train compartment, Wittgenstein had already studied logic with Bertrand
Russell for years, and had worked at notes that would become the Tractatus; he had
served in the army for four years and seen action on the Eastern Front and had lost
beloved friends such as David Pinsent. Hayek, by contrast, had just graduated from
secondary school and was recruited only shortly before war’s end. Indeed, although
they were only ten years apart, Wittgenstein and Hayek belonged to essentially
different generations: the war generation and its aftermath.
Hayek’s academic career developed rapidly after the war. In 1921 − the year the
Tractatus first appeared − Hayek finished his studies under Friedrich von Wieser,
one of the founding fathers of the Austrian school of economics. Wieser introduced
Hayek to Ludwig von Mises, who became an intellectual tutor for Hayek. Through
Mises’ seminars in Vienna, Hayek became a member of the group of liberalist
academics who were intellectually connected to the philosophical movement that
would become known as the Vienna Circle. In fact, Ludwig von Mises’s brother
Richard is said to have decisively inspired the gatherings that gave rise to the
Vienna Circle in the years that followed the First World War (Stadler 1997: 741 –
751; Hayek 1992). Through these academic ties, Hayek entered the milieu in which
the Tractatus was already prominently and heatedly discussed. Thus, while Hayek
did not meet Wittgenstein in person in the 1920s, he became aware of him as an
important and admired intellectual: The author of the Tractatus had become an
idol for his teachers and the then leading intellectuals of the Vienna Circle who
regarded the book as a miraculously presented foundation of their vision for a sci-
entific worldview. Wittgenstein, however, was no longer interested in philosophical
discussions or indeed in any academic career. He had completed the Tractatus at
the end of the war (McGuinness 1988: 287) and when the book was published three
years later, it became famous in the philosophical world. But Wittgenstein thought
that he had contributed all he could to philosophy. Like many other war veterans,
he attended a teachers’ college in Vienna in 1919. From 1920 onwards, he started
working as an elementary schoolteacher in remote villages in Lower Austria – first
in Trattenbach, later in Puchberg and, eventually, in Otterthal. Thus, Wittgenstein’s
and Hayek’s paths did not cross again for a decade, although both men spent most
of their time in Austria. Their lives had taken different directions: Wittgenstein
turning his back on the Viennese upper class of the old order and Hayek entering
the upcoming academic elite of a new world.
After working for Mises for two years, Hayek left Austria to do doctoral studies in
New York. There he became acquainted with new statistical methods for empirical
research in economics. This made him, on his return to Austria, a most valuable
collaborator for Mises, who in early 1927 appointed him the first director of the
Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek was then only 27 years old. He
now concentrated on the history of monetary and economic theory and two years
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 11

later published an essay entitled Gibt es einen Widersinn des Sparens? (Hayek 1929).
This article drew the attention of the economist Lionel Robbins, who had just
become a professor at the London School of Economics. Robbins invited Hayek to
give lectures in London, and these turned out to be so impressive that Hayek was
offered a position at the school. He accepted, and the lectures provided the basis
for his prominent book Prices and Production (1931a). It was only after that, and in
England, that Hayek and Wittgenstein would meet again.
Wittgenstein was, after all, not cut out to be an elementary school teacher
and resigned in April 1926. He moved back to Vienna and started planning and
designing a new house for his sister Margaret. Soon he would come into contact with
Moritz Schlick and other members of the Vienna Circle. Schlick tried to convince
Wittgenstein to continue his work in philosophy, just as earlier, Wittgenstein’s
English friends Frank Ramsey and John Maynard Keynes had tried to make him
to take up philosophy after the war (Monk 1991). In 1928, Wittgenstein eventually
agreed to attend two lectures by the Dutch mathematician Luitzen Brouwer who
defended his intuitionist solution to the foundational crisis in mathematics. After
these lectures, which may have been decisive for Wittgenstein’s return to philos-
ophy, he continued to have philosophical discussions with Schlick and Friedrich
Waismann, both central proponents of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein 1967; Iven
2015; cf. Stadler 1997: 449 –450). In 1929, Wittgenstein had decided to move back
to Cambridge, where his name was about to become legendary among Cambridge
philosophers and his friends were eagerly awaiting the genius they knew from the
pre-war years. Keynes, for example, famously announced Wittgenstein’s reappear-
ance in a letter thus: »Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train« (Monk
1991: 255).
It is through Wittgenstein’s old friend Keynes that he and Hayek met again.
Keynes had been one of Wittgenstein’s closest confidants during his student days at
Cambridge. On his return, Keynes not only re-introduced Wittgenstein to influen-
tial social and cultural circles; he also made him aware of the competition between
two great ideologies in economics, with Keynes’ anti-classical theory on one side
and Hayek’s plea for the free market on the other. The tension of this confrontation
is still perceptible in Hayek’s (1931b, 1932) fundamental criticism of Keynes’ Treatise
on Money (1930), to which Keynes (1931) responded just as sharply.
The intellectual constellation behind this confrontation of two great economists
during this critical period in English economics was enriched by Piero Sraffa in the
Cambridge camp and Karl Popper in the London camp. Sraffa was a Marxist Italian
economist who had emigrated to England where he was allied with Keynes and
attacked Hayek’s Prices and Production (1931a; see Sraffa 1932; cf. Lachmann 2010).
Wittgenstein’s sympathies were generally with Sraffa: at the very least, the Italian
economist made a decisive impact on Wittgenstein’s philosophical development,
so that he became one of the few people Wittgenstein (1953) mentioned by name
in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations (cf. McGuinness 2008; Iaco 2019;
12 Christian Erbacher

Morra 2019). Moreover, it is not unlikely that discussions with Sraffa have also
contributed to Wittgenstein’s romantic fantasy that he would find a congenial form
of life in the Soviet Union to which the philosopher undertook a disillusioning
journey in 1935. In the meantime, back in London, Hayek was allying himself with
Karl Popper, who would convince the former to settle in England. Popper, in turn,
can be seen as championing a philosophy of science antithetical to Wittgenstein’s,
later synthesized by Paul Feyerabend, who became Popper’s student only because
Wittgenstein had become too ill to be approached (Feyerabend 1995: 86). The
physical collision between the mindsets of these two camps is well illustrated by the
argument between Wittgenstein and Popper during a meeting of the Moral Sciences
Club in Cambridge: at one point Popper thought Wittgenstein was threatening him
with a fireplace poker (Edmonds and Eidinow 2001). Hayek, however, had witnessed
a similar incident at another meeting of the Moral Sciences Club during the Second
World War: Wittgenstein used the poker to emphasize the simplicity of a seemingly
complicated topic under discussion. Thus, Wittgenstein’s use of the poker was not
so unusual or especially directed towards Popper; but witnessing the gesture, Hayek
thought Wittgenstein had gone mad (Hayek 1992: 178 –179).
By the time Hayek and Wittgenstein started meeting occasionally at the Moral
Sciences Club, both had become English citizens. During the Second World War,
Keynes had provided Hayek with a place to stay in Cambridge in order to pro-
tect him from the London bombings (Hayek 1992: 179). But again, the exchanges
between Wittgenstein and Hayek were not significant. While Hayek continued to
elaborate his views and to bring them to great fruition (Hayek 1944), Wittgenstein
could not bear teaching philosophy under the condition of war. After the Blitz he
left Cambridge in order to work at Guy’s Hospital in London. In 1943 he took a
position in a laboratory in Newcastle. According to Hayek, actual meetings with
Wittgenstein began only at the end of the Second World War, when Wittgenstein
had been called back to Cambridge to take on his interrupted teaching duties. The
renewed contact between Wittgenstein and Hayek was prompted by Wittgenstein’s
desire to visit his sister Hermine in Vienna (Hayek 1992: 180). Hayek already knew
about all the bureaucratic requirements for gaining permission to travel home and
explained them to Wittgenstein, for whom it might have been more difficult to deal
with Austrian officials after the war.
On returning from one of these visits to Vienna, Hayek and Wittgenstein met for
the last time (Hayek 1992). Their last meeting, like their first, took place on a train:
In early 1950, they both took the night train from Vienna. Half asleep, Wittgenstein
recognized Hayek, who entered the compartment after him. In the morning they
began talking about philosophy and Russia. Just as the conversation started getting
interesting for Hayek, the train reached the French coast and the passengers had to
transfer to a ship. They did not meet again during or after the passage. – The fact that
their acquaintance began and ended with casual conversations during train rides
seems to be symbolic of their relationship: Wittgenstein and Hayek often travelled
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 13

in the same geographic direction, but they were on different intellectual journeys.
And yet, their few encounters had made such a big impression on Hayek that he felt
obliged to write a biographical account of Wittgenstein when he heard of the latter’s
death.

2. Hayek’s project of writing a biography of Wittgenstein

In the fall of 1950, six months after Wittgenstein and Hayek had met for the last time,
Hayek attained a professorship in Social and Moral Sciences at the University of
Chicago. Not long after, he must have learned of Wittgenstein’s death and decided
to write about his distant relative. But the rather superficial parallels in the two
men’s life-trajectories cannot account for Hayek’s incitement to write a biography
of Wittgenstein; nor did their political, scientific, economic or philosophical views
accord. Of course, Hayek was not a narrow-minded specialist. Just before moving to
Chicago, he had finished a long-cherished project of writing a theory of perceptual
psychology (Hayek 1952). The genre of biographical essays was also familiar to him.
He wrote such essays about John Stuart Mill and some of his own contemporaries
and companions (Hayek 1992). Hence, Hayek’s intention to write on Wittgenstein
does not seem so strange as it may appear at first. Such writing belonged to the
intellectual culture of which Hayek had become a part. And, in a very broad sense,
this cultural climate may have been what connected the two men despite all their
differences. Indeed, Hayek was first and foremost struck by Wittgenstein’s »radical
passion for truthfulness« (Hayek 1992: 177). It is this fascination with Wittgenstein’s
distinctive intellectual candor that may be the best clue to Hayek’s biographical
ambition.
Hayek started writing an article about Wittgenstein in early 1953, apparently
intending to submit it to the journal Mind. To collect more information about
the philosopher, he approached those friends and acquaintances of Wittgenstein
who were known to him. 2 Soon he had been provided with more material than he
could possibly put into one article: he received letters written by Frank Ramsey
and Moritz Schlick, both of whom had died prematurely by then; Moore supplied
records of Wittgenstein’s dictations and Pinsent’s mother sent excerpts from her
son’s diary. Finally, Russell provided the entire correspondence between himself
and Wittgenstein.

2 For a preliminary catalogue of the archival material related to the history of Hayek’s sketch
that is kept at The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archive at the University of Helsinki (WWA),
see Erbacher (2010). One of the earliest letters in this catalogue stems from 28 January 1953:
L. Hänsel to Hayek, 28 January 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren,
National Biography.
14 Christian Erbacher

Of Wittgenstein’s Austrian friends, Ludwig Hänsel was one of the first who re-
sponded to Hayek’s request. Hänsel and Wittgenstein had met in a prisoner-of-war
camp in Monte Cassino and had remained friends for the rest of their lives (Somav-
illa et al. 1994). Hänsel gladly cooperated with Hayek, sending him a summary of
important life-dates that he had compiled with the help of Wittgenstein’s sister
Margaret Stonborough and one of his close friends, the elementary schoolteacher
Rudolf Koder. Hänsel also supplied further contact addresses, for example that of
Koder and of the sculptor Michael Drobil in whose atelier Wittgenstein once had
created a bust. In his first reply to Hayek in January 1953, Hänsel stated his approval
of the planned biography:
I am very much in favor of your intention to clearly present the facts of L. W.’s
life, and the journal M. is surely the best place for it: there, everyone seriously
interested in dealing with W. will notice it. In that way, the bottom is knocked
out of certain legends. 3
Such legends about Wittgenstein were already circulating at the time. In particular,
Hänsel pointed to two essays that had been published in February 1952 in a journal
called Der Monat (Cranston 1952; Ferrater Mora 1952). He mentioned to Hayek
that Elizabeth Anscombe (1952) had immediately published a retraction in the
same journal. 4 Further, he informed Hayek that Anscombe was one of the literary
executors who Wittgenstein had appointed to prepare his unpublished writings for
publication. Hänsel already knew Anscombe, since she and the two other literary
executors − Rush Rhees and Georg Henrik von Wright − had been in Austria in the
summer of 1952 and had met with Hänsel and Mrs Stonborough. On this occasion,
Hänsel gave von Wright the letters Wittgenstein had received from Keynes, Ramsey
and Schlick during his time as an elementary school teacher. Hänsel informed
Hayek of these letters as well. Since Sraffa had already told Hayek that it might
be relevant to contact von Wright, Hayek did not hesitate to write to the Finnish
philosopher concerning his plans:
Since I was under the impression that nobody was preparing a biographical sketch
of my late ›cousin‹ Ludwig Wittgenstein (Strictly speaking a second cousin once
removed), I have some while ago started to collect material for such a sketch. Piero
Sraffa of Trinity College, Cambridge, to whom I had written in this connection, now
informs me that you and Miss Anscombe have some biographical material which

3 Letter from Hänsel to Hayek, 28 January 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography. The passage cited has been translated by Christian Erbacher; the
original reads: »Ihre Absicht die Daten von L.W.s Leben klar herauszustellen, begrüße ich sehr,
und die Zeitschrift M. ist dafür sicher der beste Platz: dort nehmen Sie alle zur Kenntnis die
ernstlich mit W. zu tun haben. Gewissen Legenden ist damit der Boden entzogen.«
4 Letter from Hänsel to Hayek, 28 January 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography. In her rectification, Anscombe points out, for example, that
Wittgenstein did not turn to catholic faith towards the end of his life.
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 15

you presumably intend to use in connection with the edition of Philosophische

Untersuchungen.
My main purpose in writing to you (and in writing a similar letter to Miss
Anscombe) is to find out whether with my plans I would be duplicating work
which is already being done. If you think, however, that after what you and Miss
Anscombe are already doing, there will still be room for such a purely biographical
sketch as I had contemplated, I should be grateful if you could let me know whether
you have any material which I could and should use in this connection.
I should say that I never knew L. W. well, although I have met him again and again
over a period of nearly thirty years. The only time I saw a little more of him was
just before and just after the last war when I lived in Cambridge. 5

Before von Wright responded to this letter, he wanted to think over Hayek’s suit-
ability for the project. Still remembering the bad impression caused by the essays
about Wittgenstein in Der Monat, von Wright consulted Anscombe:

Yesterday I received a letter from Professor F. A. Hayek. He tells me that he is

preparing a biographical sketch of Wittgenstein. He has probably written to you
too. Before I answer him I should very much like to hear your opinion.
There seems to me to be two possibilities. Either we believe that Professor Hayek’s
biography will be definitely bad, in which case one should rather try to dissuade
him from the task than to encourage him by supplying information. Or we have
reasons for believing that H. is as well or better qualified for the task than anyone
else who is likely to undertake it in the near future and that he could write
something trustworthy and decent. In this case I should be prepared to give him
all assistance I can.
I am inclined in favour of the second possibility. I do not know Professor Hayek
personally, nor have I read anything which he has written. To judge from reviews
and opinions I have heard, he enjoys a high reputation both among economists and
historians. /Opinions about his writings on political economy probably diverge./
He knew Wittgenstein during a long period, even if not intimately, and he has
connections with the family.
Is it likely that a more competent biographer will be found in the near future? I
doubt it. It would surprise me, if some-one among his more intimate friends, in
England, Austria, or elsewhere felt inclined to undertake the task. On the other
hand it cannot be excluded that some-one really incompetent – type Cranston –
writes about W. The publication of the Untersuchungen may afford fresh stimulus
for prospectus biographers. If they know of Prof. Hayek’s plans and that we support
them, they may refrain from putting their own into action. Or, alternatively, H’s
book may be useful in correcting or counterbalancing the bad impression pro-
duced by other books.

5 Letter from Hayek to von Wright, 20 January 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
16 Christian Erbacher

Unless you are going to make some special investigations for the purpose, I should
be very grateful for an early reply. In the meantime I shall take some of H’s books
out of the Library here and try to form an opinion of his ability as a writer and
researcher. 6

Anscombe replied after ›thinking a great deal about the issue‹ and she saw no reason
to discourage Hayek from publishing a biographical sketch in Mind. 7 She would
agree to provide him with factual data in order to guarantee an accurate account,
but she did not feel inclined to give him personal documents such as Wittgenstein’s
coded diaries or letters. Nor would she reminisce for him. Anscombe thought Hayek
would surely do a better job than Cranston (1952) and Ferrater Mora (1952), but she
was all but convinced of his qualities. Von Wright answered Hayek’s letter along
similar lines:

It would be a great thing indeed, if you could write but a short biography giving
a correct account of the main events of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and providing
reliable facts about his character and his views. I do not mean his philosophy; it will
speak for itself. I think this important for several reasons. There will in the course of
time grow up a huge literature on L. W. Various interpretations of his thought and
of his personality will be given. ›Positivistic‹, ›metaphysical‹, ›religious‹, ›artistic‹,
etc. One cannot prevent much nonsense from being said and even believed. But
the existence of one or two reliable sources of factual information can do much
to restrict the circulation of obvious falsehood. – The obituary and articles which
have appeared after his death have almost without exception contained gross
errors and misunderstandings. 8

To von Wright – just as to Anscombe and Hänsel – it was of primary importance that
a publication about Wittgenstein’s life should provide reliable information and, if
necessary, rectifications of circulating falsehoods. Von Wright also mentioned that
he too was working on a sketch about Wittgenstein:

As a matter of fact I have myself written a kind of biographical sketch of L.W.

in Swedish. I hope to improve upon it and enlarge it and shall perhaps at some
time publish it or part of it. I should also like to write »recollections« of L.W.: of
our conversations, of his opinions on various things, of his likes and dislikes in
literature and art, etc. But whether I can put down anything worth publishing,
I am highly sceptical [sic] about. In no case will my work render your proposed
undertaking superfluous or else »compete« with it. 9

6 Letter from von Wright to Anscombe, 5 February 1953, NLF, Coll.714.11-12.

7 Letter from Anscombe to von Wright, without date, NLF, COLL.714.11-12.
8 Letter from von Wright to Hayek, 22 February 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
9 Letter from von Wright to Hayek, 22 February 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 17

Indeed, Hayek had mainly collected information about Wittgenstein’s life up to

1929, and von Wright’s draft focused on the years after that date. Thus, the mate-
rials that they had assembled seemed to complement each other. This encouraged
Hayek, in his next letter, to give an overview of what he had achieved thus far.
He explained that he wanted to write a sketch and to send it to Wittgenstein’s
friends so that additions and corrections could be made. 10 In fact, Hayek finished
this first draft already in the spring of 1953 and sent it to his informants. This swift
sortie, however, provoked a reaction that – in retrospect – can be recognized as a
foreshadowing of the fatal development that Hayek’s project was to take. Hänsel
reported to Hayek in March 1953:

I let read this draft Mrs Margaret Stonborough, a sister of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who was especially interested in the letters to B. Russell. Yet, she is convinced
that – apart from factual dates of his life − a good characterisation of her brother is
nearly impossible due to the tremendous complexity of his nature. In her opinion,
a collection of anecdotes about him would be the best. 11

Hänsel politely hinted to Hayek that Margaret Stonborough disliked his plan. The
true extent of it comes across in a frank letter she wrote to her son:

Hayek asked for family details about Luki in a very unlikeable letter. ›Maybe letters
to the Mama‹, this Mistfratz, this gruesome Mistfratz. I have [. . .] written a very cold
letter of refusal and told him, how strong we are against this kind of ›biographical
sketch‹, how gruesome it would have been to Luki. 12

In the letter of refusal that she wrote to Hayek, Mrs Stonborough made clear that she
considered it her duty to state unambiguously her complete rejection of the project.
According to her, Wittgenstein would have been furious and done whatever he
could to prevent the writing of a biographical sketch that discussed his childhood,

10 Letter from von Wright to Hayek, 27 February 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
11 Letter from Hänsel to Hayek, 8 March 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography. The passage cited has been translated by Christian Erbacher; the
original reads: »Ich habe diese Skizze Frau Margaret Stonborough, einer Schwester Ludwig
Wittgensteins, lesen lassen, die besonders die Briefe an B. Russell interessiert haben. Sie ist
jedoch überzeugt, daß über die äußeren Lebensdaten hinaus – eine gute Charakterisierung
ihres Bruders wegen der ungeheuren Komplexität seines Wesens kaum möglich sei. Am besten
wäre, ihrer Meinung nach, eine Sammlung von Anekdoten über ihn.«
12 Margaret Stonborough in a letter to Thomas Stonborough in spring 1953. The passage cited
has been translated by Christian Erbacher; the original reads: »Der Hayek hat mich in einem
sehr unsympathischen Brief um familiäre Details about Luki gebeten. ›Eventuell Briefe an die
Mama‹, der Mistfratz der grausliche. Ich habe [. . .] einen sehr kalten Absagebrief geschrieben
und gesagt wie sehr wir gegen diese Art von ›biographischer Skizze‹ seien, wie gräulich sie dem
Luki gewesen wären« Quoted from (Iven 2009: 156).
18 Christian Erbacher

home and milieu. In her opinion, the piety towards this attitude demanded a serious
silence. 13 This fundamental objection is explained in her letter to von Wright:
Everybody seems to have had a letter from Prof. Hayek + there are a great many
different opinions about him. I don’t know him (his mother was distantly related
to us) but I just hate the idea of any biographical sketch of my brother written by
somebody who did not know him. Of all the sketches I have read up to now only
a single one, an Australian, which Miss Anscombe sent to me was so that Ludwig
would have read it without feeling sick. Good old Prof. Hänsel came to see me + I
showed it to him + then I could without hurting him make it clear that this was
the only way to describe Ludwig without sentimentality. Now Hayek has never
ever seen him, never met him, knows nobody who knew him! No, I am bitterly
against that sort of biography. The man that writes such a thing lacks seriousness
+ if anybody’s biography demands seriousness it is surely Ludwigs. 14
After receiving this letter, von Wright kept his promise of sending Hayek a draft
of his own essay about Wittgenstein, but at the same time he began having sec-
ond thoughts about Hayek’s undertaking. Thus he contacted Rhees – the third
literary executor of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass alongside Anscombe and himself –
asking him to read Hayek’s draft. In the meantime, Hayek included the information
he had received from von Wright’s biographical sketch and returned the revised
manuscript. 15 Von Wright read Hayek’s draft with great care and made a large num-
ber of corrections and additions. The exchange of facts and details between Hayek
and von Wright intensified. For a time, there was a prospect of fruitful cooperation
in an atmosphere of friendly collegiality. Both academic gentlemen shared broad
interests: Hayek read von Wright’s (1942) essay about Lichtenberg with profit, and
von Wright, in turn, wanted to use Hayek’s (1952) work on perceptual psychology in
his lectures. As summer approached they even thought of a meeting.
At this stage, neither von Wright nor Hayek seemed to have properly recognized
Mrs Stonborough’s determination to stop the project. This changed in mid-June
1953, when she reminded von Wright about the matter. Hayek had replied to her that
he could understand her attitude but that he would not give up his project because
of it. 16 Mrs Stonborough now forwarded a copy of her rejection letter to von Wright.
She may have welcomed a good biography of her brother, but presumably not by

13 Copy of the letter from M. Stonborough to Hayek sent in a letter from M. Stonborough to
von Wright, 12 June 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren, National
Biography.
14 M. Stonborough to von Wright, 12 June 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography. The mentioned biographical sketch refers to Gasking and Jackson
(1951).
15 This is the first draft of Hayek’s sketch kept at WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography.
16 Letter from M. Stonborough to von Wright, 12 June 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographi-
cal\2. Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 19

Hayek and not at this time. 17 She may therefore have become impatient when
Hänsel did not stop cooperating with him: He was providing Hayek with documents
about Wittgenstein as a teacher and Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Ramsey
and Keynes. However, he also could appreciate the objections of Wittgenstein’s
sister. Hänsel’s letter appears to explore the possibilities of reconciliation between
the different parties by suggesting the kind of biographical account that might gain
Mrs Stonborough’s approval:

I think we are in complete agreement: it (our worry) is not so much the interpreta-
tion that you would give certain features of W., but rather the extent of that, which
in detail from his life ought to be made available to the public. Your biography is
neither meant to become a revelation (in short:) à la Goethe, nor is it supposed
to provide material for psychoanalysts. As mentioned, a distanced presentation of
the essential surely is best suited to destroy fantastic legends and prevent new ones
from appearing. 18

In July 1953, Hänsel sent Hayek copies of official assessments of Wittgenstein as

a teacher and, later, Wittgenstein’s Dictionary for Elementary Schools (Wittgen-
stein 1926) − which was not a philosophical work but was the second book Wittgen-
stein published during his lifetime. Hayek, meanwhile, had become fully aware that
his project was seriously in danger. He therefore approached von Wright, asking
him to defend the project in the face of Mrs Stonborough’s resistance. 19
Having thus been urged to intervene on behalf of both sides of the conflict, von
Wright felt irritated. In his reply to Hayek, he ignored the whole matter and only
made references to factual and historical aspects of the sketch. He wanted to await
the literary executors’ next meeting in Oxford in the summer, so they could agree on
a solution. As it turned out, they regarded Hayek’s sketch as anything but good. In
fact, to the literary executors who had been students and friends of Wittgenstein for
a long time, Hayek’s ignorance of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought must have
been plain. Since their task as literary executors was to them a question of doing
justice to the man they knew, to his philosophy and his wishes for publication,

17 Notes from a conversation with Pierre Stonborough.

18 Letter Hänsel to Hayek, 25 June 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren,
National Biography. The passage cited has been translated by Christian Erbacher; the original
reads: »Ich glaube, wir sind ja einer Meinung: es handelt sich (bei unserer Sorge) nicht so sehr
um die Interpretation, die Sie gewissen Zügen von W. geben würden, sondern um das Ausmaß
dessen, was überhaupt an Einzelheiten aus seinem Leben preisgegeben werden soll. Ihre Bi-
ographie soll ja weder eine Enthüllung (kurz gesagt:) à la Goethe werden, noch Material für
Psychoanalytiker liefern. Eine, wie gesagt, distanzierte Darstellung des Wesentlichen ist sicher
am besten geeignet, die phantastischen Legenden zu zerstören und neue nicht aufkommen zu
lassen.«
19 Letter from Hayek to von Wright, 2 July 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek,
Sjögren, National Biography.
20 Christian Erbacher

their reservations turned into an idea of how to postpone publication of Hayek’s

manuscript:

Elizabeth has written that you propose writing to Hayek saying that we intend to
publish the Russell letters, and asking him not to publish them before we do. I
think that is a good idea. 20

As Hayek’s sketch essentially built upon the letters to Russell, Anscombe and von
Wright may have expected that Hayek would give up his project. Rhees, however,
was concerned that he might persist:

I am not sure that it will silence Hayek. Even if he does not plead that he would
quote only the purely ›autobiographical‹ parts, – he may insist on doing the life
all the same, even without the letters. I hope very much that he can be discour-
aged from this. It might be necessary for some one to publish a note in Mind or
elsewhere repudiating or condemning his work, if he does persist. 21

Contrary to that apprehension, Hayek reacted like a gentleman when, firstly,

Anscombe and, later on, von Wright told him about their decision concerning the
letters to Russell: 22

I am in no hurry and in fact have no ambition of authorship. If the task on which

I started is performed better by somebody else, so much the better; and I shall in
any case make no attempt to anticipate you. Indeed, if the end is best served by my
turning over to you the material I have collected, I shall be glad to do so. 23

Hayek sent von Wright the revised sketch he had finished during the summer and
which included von Wright’s corrections. 24 This second version von Wright did not
extensively correct. Hayek generously passed on his collected materials, copies of
photographs, notes made by Moore, the correspondence with Ramsey and Keynes
and the excerpts from Pinsent’s diary. He also complimented von Wright on his own
biographical sketch of Wittgenstein:

Whatever you write about W., I hope you will incorporate and if possible enlarge
what you say on page 15 of the draft of your article I have. So far as I understand it

20 Letter from Rhees to von Wright, 18 September 1953, NLF, Coll.714.200-201.

21 Letter from Rhees to von Wright, 18 September 1953, NLF, Coll.714.200-201.
22 Letter from Anscombe to von Wright, 16 September 1953, NLF, Coll.714.11-12; letter from von
Wright to Hayek, 13 October 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren,
National Biography.
23 Letter from Hayek to von Wright, 17 October 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
24 This is the second draft of Hayek’s sketch kept at WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 21

(my knowledge of Swedish is almost nil) it seems to me the best characteristic yet
attempted. 25

Von Wright appreciated Hayek’s composure in not pushing the issue further and
thanked him cordially for his biographical documents. Thus, the conflict, rather
than ending in animosity, was handled with diplomacy and good will. It followed
a brief exchange of facts about Wittgenstein’s years as a student, and that marked
the end of Hayek’s concern for his biography of Wittgenstein. His work, however,
was not undertaken in vain.

3. The second life of Hayek’s sketch

Hayek was the first to systematically collect material from Wittgenstein’s friends
for publication in a biographical account. He must have realized that it would take
far more research to write such an account. Indeed, it took decades before a life
of Wittgenstein was published. But for almost any of the subsequent biographical
works, Hayek’s pioneering work was most valuable. Von Wright used some of this
material in his own biographical sketch that was published in Swedish in 1954 and
in English in 1955. His main aim for the essay was to provide an accurate account of
the historical facts about Wittgenstein’s life in order to prevent the further creation
of legends. His essay, however, had become far more than a plain collection of
historical facts, as correctly observed by Charlie D. Broad, a close friend of von
Wright and an intellectual antipode to Wittgenstein:

Von Wright does not confine himself to a bare record of facts. He gives his own
estimate, which is very high indeed, of Wittgenstein’s personality and intellect and
of his earliest and his later contributions to philosophy. (Broad 1959: 304)

Mrs Stonborough also praised von Wright’s biographical sketch:

A most beautiful memorial + a touching one. I think he would have held it high. 26

It seems that everyone was content with the way the matter of Hayek’s biographical
sketch was settled. After the literary executors intervened, Hayek lost interest in
writing a biography of Wittgenstein and stopped developing the manuscript (Hayek
1983: 139). Twenty years later, however, he did publish an essay about Wittgenstein
(Hayek 1977). It contained none of the material he had collected for the biography,
but only a personal account of his own encounters with the philosopher. Hayek

25 Letter from Hayek to von Wright, 17 October 1953, WWA, WWA documents\Biographical\2.
Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
26 Letter from M. Stonborough to von Wright, 30 November 1953, WWA, WWA documents\
Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
22 Christian Erbacher

thus restrained his writing, publishing only the kind of biographical recollection
Mrs Stonborough had regarded as appropriate and decent.
Nevertheless, the material Hayek had gathered was not lost: in 1961 Anscombe
and von Wright published parts of the letters to Russell in their edition of Wittgen-
stein’s (1961) notebooks dating from the period of the Great War and thus elucidat-
ing the genesis of the Tractatus. At that time, von Wright had already thought of
writing an essay on the origins of the Tractatus. He followed up that idea but only
10 years later, when he found an early manuscript of the Tractatus in Gmunden
(Austria), the so-called Prototractatus. Von Wright’s essay on the origins of the
Tractatus would serve as an introduction to the published edition of the Prototrac-
tatus (Wittgenstein 1971; reprinted in von Wright 1982: 63 –109). In preparing it, von
Wright contacted Hayek, who had by then moved to Freiburg, Germany. The two
resumed the genteel, friendly and cooperative tone in which they had parted. But
while Hayek’s original inquiries proved to be very helpful for von Wright’s essay,
his contribution to von Wright’s new investigations was confined to a list of the
sources he had passed on to Thomas Stonborough and Brian McGuinness (Hayek
1983: 139). McGuinness, the second editor of the Prototractatus edition, also used
Hayek’s pioneering work for his life of Wittgenstein:

Among the friends and family of Wittgenstein who have helped me a special
place is occupied by Professor Friedrich von Hayek. He, a cousin, was the first,
to my knowledge, to start collecting material for a biography. He corresponded
with Wittgenstein’s then surviving sisters and brother (who were, however, not
disposed to further the project) and with many other valuable witnesses (as, for
example, Ludwig Hänsel, just mentioned). Professor Hayek not only gave me the
benefit of his recollections in person, but also made available to me the sketch (as
he terms it) that he had written and also, here with extraordinary generosity, the
correspondence on which it was largely based. (McGuinness 1988: x)

In this acknowledgement, McGuinness emphasized that besides Hayek’s sketch

itself, the sources collected by Hayek were of great value to him. This reminds us
that the sketch was not meant for publication in that form. 27 Accordingly, when
reading Hayek’s sketch today, one should not measure it against the standards of a
published piece. However, the conception of composition of the sketch as arranged
by Hayek can be analyzed in broad strokes: The curriculum vitae, as produced
by Hänsel together with Mrs Stonborough and Koder, formed the framework for
Hayek’s essay. This skeleton was fleshed out with information that can be divided
into three main categories: first, Family Background, for which no written source
material could be identified; second, Pre-War Years, which are mainly shaped by
the correspondence with Russell (today edited in several volumes, most completely

27 The document referred to is the third version of Hayek’s draft kept at WWA, WWA documents\
Biographical\2. Hayek, Sjögren, National Biography.
 The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 23

in Wittgenstein 2011) and the diary entries of Pinsent (edited by von Wright in
Pinsent 1990) and third, War and Postwar Years, with information based mainly on
reports by Hänsel and Paul Engelmann. Table 1 provides a more detailed overview
of the parts of Hayek’s sketch and their sources.

Table 1. Overview of topical segments in Hayek’s draft and their primary sources, based on
research at The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA).
Segment Main Theme Pages Sources at WWA
No
1 Family background and 1 –4 No specific sources, possibly
schooldays until beginning of personal knowledge and
university studies background information
2 Wittgenstein’s years in 4 –8 Report by W. Eccles and W. Mays
Manchester
3 Pre-War years in Cambridge and 8 –28 Correspondence with Russell,
journey to Norway Pinsent’s diary
4 First World War and war 28 –30 Reports by Hänsel and
imprisonment Engelmann
5 Early inter-war era 30 –34 Correspondence with Russell
6 Wittgenstein as elementary 34 –41 Information from Putre, Berger,
schoolteacher in Trattenbach, Rosner, Scherleitner, Keynes,
Neunkirchen, Puchberg, Ramsey and Schlick (all procured
Otterthal by Hänsel)
7 Wittgenstein in Vienna 41 –45 Reports by Hänsel and
Engelmann

The list of sources shows what McGuinness hinted at in his acknowledgement,

namely, that Hayek had collected important information about Wittgenstein’s life –
information which later biographers could almost not do without. Hence, William
Bartley (1973) and Wilhelm Baum (1985) included reverend acknowledgements.
What is more, Ray Monk too mentions Hayek’s draft as a source for his biography
(Monk 1991: 641). Traces of Hayek’s text can be found, for example, in Monk’s
introductory passages about the family history (Monk 1991: 7) and some paragraphs
about Wittgenstein’s time in Manchester correspond with the report of Eccles and
Mays, which Hayek had also included in his sketch (Monk 1991: 29 –35).
Thus, Hayek’s efforts to write a biography of Wittgenstein and the documents
collected by him have eventually found their way into the two standard biogra-
phies of Wittgenstein by McGuinness and Monk. In these biographies, the factual
mistakes that Hayek’s draft contains have been corrected. However, the number
of mistakes that Hayek made in transcribing his sources indicate that his interest
was not the one of a philologist or a historian, but of a man who wanted to create
an intellectual portrait. As such Hayek’s fragment is of great interest, especially
to those who study the development of how Wittgenstein has been portrayed in
24 Christian Erbacher

written accounts. The draft and its story are valuable as expressions of Hayek’s own
sensibility vis-à-vis that of his cousin. It is remarkable that Hayek’s draft, even in its
fragmental form, is free from any worship of Wittgenstein’s genius. The philosopher
is rather presented as a very rich young man, with afflictions and shortcomings
and – first and foremost – struggling to find his intellectual way. In this sense, the
draft may be said to show Hayek’s way of being true to what incited him to write his
biographical account: Wittgenstein’s passion for truthfulness, integrity and serious-
ness. It was the appreciation of precisely these traits that led Wittgenstein’s sister
and his literary executors to intervene with the publication of Hayek’s sketch then –
and that justifies its publication now.

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Editorial Note

The document that is edited here may be found at the Von Wright and Wittgenstein
Archives at the University of Helsinki, Section III, biographical, 42. It is annotated
in Georg Henrik von Wright’s hand with the heading: A final version of the sketch,
received 6 March 1967. Confidential, Not for publication. In the following transcrip-
tion, corrections, deletions and spelling mistakes by von Hayek were preserved if
they added to an understanding of the fragment; few obvious orthographic mistakes
were corrected. Factual mistakes have not been corrected. The draft was written
with a typewriter; typewritten additions are placed in single slashes /, handwritten
additions are placed in slashes and set in italics. Line breaks and paragraph breaks
of von Hayek’s typescript have been preserved; page breaks are indicated by page
number in square brackets, e.g. [page 2]. Footnotes are von Hayek’s. Corrections
of von Hayek’s mistakes in transcribing his sources can be found in endnotes. The
sources that von Hayek has quoted have been published by now; if the place of
publication is not otherwise indicated in endnotes, the source can be found in:
Wittgenstein, L. 2011. Gesamtbriefwechsel – Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe, 2nd
release. Edited by A. Coda, G. Citron, B. Halder, A. Janik, U. Lobis, K. Mayr, B. F.
McGuinness, M. Schorner, M. Seekircher and J. Wang for the Forschungsinstitut
Brenner-Archiv. Virgina: Intelex.
28 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

UNFINISHED DRAFT OF A SKETCH OF A BIOGRAPHY OF

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

written in 1953 for private circulation by F.A. v. Hayek,

with some later corrections and insertions

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889,

as the youngest child of a family unusually gifted in se-
veral ways.1)

His paternal grandfather, a jewish wool- merchant in Saxony,

had married a daughter of another similar family who had
established themselves in Vienna and there become bankers
and made themselves well known as patrons of the arts and
for their musical gifts. Not long after their marriage this
couple also moved to Vienna and here Karl Wittgenstein,
Ludwig’s father, grew up to become one of the most success-
ful industrialists of old Austria. Highly gifted and strong
willed, the young man soon revolted against the efforts to
give him a careful classical education, and at the age of
seventeen withdrew himself from the paternal authority by
running away to America when, after he had been expelled
for indiscipline from one of the best schools, he was to
be put in charge of a domestic tutor.

The family learnt only after some weeks that he had arrived
at New York with little more than his fiddle and was main-
taining himself there as waiter and barkeeper and later by

1) In this sketch I act essentially as compiler of information

collected from others. I have undertaken it because as a
distant relation (a second cousin once removed) of L.W.,
who like him moved from Austria to England, I know at least
the background in both countries and a great many of his
friends. But though I have met him many times over an inter-
val of nearly thirty years, I have never known him well.
I had promised several of my informants that they would see
a draft of this before I published anything – indeed this
draft was intended mainly as a skeleton to be filled in
by the comments of W.’s friends and was not intended to be
published in this form. But as I never completed it, I also
never circulated it for approval and comments as I had in-
tended.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 29

- 2 -

teaching the violin, mathematics, and German. After two

years he returned to Vienna, studied for a short time at
the Institute of Technology and worked in various engineering
firms. A job offered to him by a relative as a draftsman
on the construction of a new steel rolling mill in Bohemia
provided the great opportunity: entering at the age of 25,
he soon virtually directed the construction and after four
years had risen to the position of managing director of the
new works. His further rise, which in another ten years made
him head of the biggest iron and steel company in Austria
and one of the richest men in the country is reminiscent
of that of some of the American industrial leaders and
has only few counterparts among European business men of
the period. An early acquisition of the patent for the
Thomas process and the organisation of the first cartel
in his industry in Austria were among the decisive steps
in this career. He was able to retire from active business
when he was scarcely over fifty and when his youngest
son was only nine years old. He was not only a man of
exceptional energy and organizing capacity but also of
considerable intellectual and artistic gifts: a collection
of his occasional articles and lectures on economic policy,
put together after his death,1) show a lucidity and terseness
of expression in which some friends believe to recognize
a similarity of intellectual style with his philosopher -
son, who certainly shared with his father some traits
of temperament and who was more devoted to him than to
any other member of the family.

Karl Wittgenstein had married early and his wife, the

daughter of a Viennese banker and a girl from a Styrian
country family, was in her way also a remarkable person:
gentle and like her husband highly musical, it was large-
ly due to her that the Wittgenstein home in Vienna became
a center of musical life where Johannes Brahms was a fre-
quent guest.

1) Karl Wittgenstein, Zeitungsartikel and Vorträge, private-

ly printed, Vienna 1913.
30 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 3 -

There were five sons and three daughters, but the father
had the misfortune still to see two of his sons, of whom
the eldest was regarded as a musical genius, voluntarily
end their lives, while a third, serving as an officer in
the Austrian army, sought death when at the collapse of
Austria in 1918 the men under his command refused to obey
orders. The fourth brother, Paul, who already before 1914
had made a reputation as a pianist, lost his right arm
during the war, but with unbelievable energy trained him-
self to play with one hand and triumphantly resumed his
public performances. Of the sisters the eldest, who remained
unmarried, was a gifted painter and in some measure conti-
nued the family tradition as a patron of the arts in Vien-
na. Although Ludwig’s senior by more than fourteen years,
she was towards the end of their lives the member of the
family with whom he had most contact.

As had been the case with the elder members of the family,
Ludwig was educated at home until his fourteenth year,
according to a scheme designed by his father, which might
have been appropriate for a person equally determined to
get on in the world but which did not prove successful with
his sons. Ludwig, in particular, showed little aptitude
for any of the school subjects and few intellectual in-
terests except in mechanics, where he showed considerable
skill (he is said as a small boy to have built a sewing
machine). At last, when the father discovered the lack
of progress, it was decided to send him to a state school
and a Realschule was decided upon, i.e. a school type
emphasizing the mathematical and physical disciplines and
aiming more at practical careers, also lasting a year less
and being somewhat less exacting in its standards than the
classical education of the Gymnasium. Since it seemed
doubtful whether Ludwig would pass the entrance examina-
tion in Vienna for the form appropriate to his age, he
tried and succeeded at one of the provincial schools, at
Linz in Upper Austria. Here he spent three years (1903/4
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 31

- 4 -

to 1905/6) as a boarder with the family of a professor at

the local Gymnasium. This seems to have been the beginning
of a period of acute unhappiness and spiritual loneli-
ness which lasted until nine years later he found in
Cambridge a purpose and congenial surroundings.

On completion of the Realschule at the age of seventeen,

he could not, without an extra year’s work, have entered
a regular University, since the passing out examination
entitled to admission only to an Institute of Technology
(Technische Hochschule). He decided to take up mechanical
engineering, led, it appears, by an interest in aeroplane
construction with which he had played while at school,
and proceeded to the Technische Hochschule at Berlin-
Charlottenburg. But the year spent there proved disap-
pointing and he left after three semesters in the spring
of 1908 and in the following autumn registered as a
research student in the Engineering Laboratory of the
University of Manchester.

The Manchester Years

Contributed by W. Eccles and W. Mays1

Before he went to Cambridge for the first time, Wittgen-

stein lived for some years in Manchester, and until recent-
ly little was known about this period of his life. The
only information available was that at the age of nineteen
he came to Manchester from the Technische Hochschule Berlin-
Charlottenburg, where he had studied engineering, and that
he had left Vienna about a year earlier. He registered as
a student doing research in the Engineering Laboratory in
the autumn of 1908, where according to the records he
remained from 1908 - 10.

On February 1st of this year (1954) one of the authors

(W.M.) received in reply to a letter in the Manchester
Guardian, a phone call from a very old friend of Witt-
genstein’s (W. E.), who was able to give valuable informa-
32 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 5 -

tion about the Manchester period which led to their

writing this joint article. Additional information was
also kindly given by Mr. J. Bamber, formerly of the En-
gineering Laboratory, and Mr. C. M. Mason, the present
Assistant Director. A further search through the Universi-
ty records showed that Wittgenstein was elected by the
Senate to a research studentship in 1910 and again in 1911.
It is also known that in 1911 he lived at 104 Palatine
Road.

It seems clear that Wittgenstein came to Manchester to

do work in aeronautics; it is not known what started his
interest in this subject, but he brought with him some
prints of early balloons which are now in W. E.’s posses-
sion. These have recently been identified by the Royal
Aeronautical Society and do not seem to have been as
important as Wittgenstein thought them to be.

W. E. first met Wittgenstein at the Grouss Inn on the

Glossop Mayfield Road in the summer of 1908, where the
latter had come to try out some experimental kites using
the equipment of the kite flying upper atmosphere station
which was being run under the direction of Dr. Schuster,
Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester. A
photograph taken about 1908 at Glossop shows them both
holding an experimental kite, with the Grouse Inn at the
background.

They lived together at the Grouse Inn, whilst each carried

on with his own experimental work. Wittgenstein had arrived
some time before and W. E. found him in the common living
room surrounded with books and papers on the table and
also on the floor. As it was impossible to move about the
room without disturbing books he set to and tidied the
place up much to Wittgenstein’s amusement and subsequent
appreciation. This was the beginning of a very close friend-
ship between them.

When he first came to Manchester, Wittgenstein was very

wealthy, though he never lived ostentiously he did not
hesitate to get anything he wanted. On one Sunday morning
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 33

- 6 -

in Manchester in 1910, for example, he decided he would

like to go to Blackpool, and Wittgenstein and W. E. went
off together to the railway station, though he was told
there was no suitable train. This did not deter him, he
said he would see about ordering a special train, still
possible in those days. He was dissuaded from doing this,
and they took a taxi to Liverpool instead and had a trip
on the fery there before returning to Manchester.

His experimental work with kites did not last long as he

soon realised that until some form of engine was available
it was not much use developing an aeroplane. By a stroke
of good fortune the plans still exist of his experimental
engine. It is known how he arrived at the idea of having
a reaction jet at the tip of each blade of a propeller,
but he soon realised that the design of the combustion
chamber with its discharge nozzle for the hot gases was all
important and accordingly he transferred his interests
from the moors at Glossop to the laboratory of the Enginee-
ring Department where he had a variable volume combustion
chamber constructed by Messrs. Cook nearby and had it
arranged for a variety of fuel spray and gas discharge
nozzles.

The whole assembly was workmanlike and practical for its

purpose and the jet of hot gas from discharge nozzle on
top was arranged to impinge on a deflector plate where its
reaction could be measured. This apparatus was operated
successfully, but before much experimental work was done
with it, Wittgenstein got interested in the design of the
propeller and as this lent itself to a complete mathema-
tical treatment his interests in mathematics developed
and eventually in turn the propeller got forgotten.

It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein’s idea of a

combustion chamber together with a tangential reaction
nozzle at the tip of a propeller blade was brought into
practical use for the rotor blades of a heliocopter by
the Austrian designer Doblhog during the second world war
34 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 7 -

and is now adopted by Fairey’s for their Jet Gyrodyne as

well as by others.

Mr. Bamber writes that he remembers Wittgenstein doing work

on the combustion of gases. "He used to ignore the midday
meal break and carry on til evening and in his lodgings in
Fallowfield his pastime was to relax in a bathful of very
hot water. .... He had great musical appreciation, and only
for the more profound composers: Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms,
etc. I used to attend the Halle concerts with him occasional-
ly where he used to sit through the concert without speaking
a word, completely absorbed."

Mr. Mason says that in the autumn of 1909 whilst completing

arrangements to take up a post abroad, "I helped Wittgenstein
to erect some heavy apparatus which he had removed from the
physics department to the new research laboratory on the
Engineering Department. This high duty compressor was needed
in connection with the researches he wanted to undertake on
high pressure gases. My recollection is of a charming enthu-
siastic man not very well accustomed to handling and assem-
bling of engineering machinery. He was a most pleasant com-
panion. It was a delight to observe his musical enthusiasm.
I well remember his reaction at my pronunciation of the name
of his favourite musician Paderewski."

A frequent conversation with Wittgenstein was the design

of furniture and houses. He could not stand ornamentation
for its own sake, and when he stayed with W. E. every picture
was removed from the walls and all the normal ornaments from
his room, leaving it with only a bed or a chair. At the same
time he liked his room to be tastefully decorated in plain
colours and a favourite combination was a plain blue carpet,
black woodwork, golden coloured walls and a white ceiling.

Wittgenstein was a frequent visitor to W. E.’s home. Most

of the family, and other people who got to know Wittgenstein
adored him. A photograph of Wittgenstein taken about this
time shows him as a good looking young man with a pleasant
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 35

- 8 -

smile on his face. Whenever Wittgenstein became thoughtfull

about matters which they did not understand he was quite
usually left in quiet alone. At times his lapses of silence
would have the appearance of rudeness, but this was far
from being his intention, indeed he was very upset if he
thought he had ever shown the slightest rudeness to any-
one.

A number of letters and postcards from Wittgenstein to W. E.

are still in the latter’s possession. Most of them deal with
family and personal matters, and also with Wittgenstein’s
election to a Research Fellowship at Trinity College,
Cambridge in 1930 and in 1939 to the Professorship of
Philosophy.

One or two letters dated 1925 speak of change which had

come over him. He fears that the great events external and
internal that lie between him and his English friends might
prevent them from understanding one another. In answering
an invitation from W. E. to come to England he says "England
may not have changed since 1913 but I have. However, its
no use writing to you about that as I couldn’t explain to
you the exact nature of the change (although I perfectly
understand it) you will see it yourself when I get there."
Mrs. Eccles remembers that when Wittgenstein did come to
stay with them in Manchester, he asked her to obtain a
copy of his book Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, which
he had apparently not yet seen, though it had been published
three or four years previously, but no Manchester bookseller
had one in stock! Finally the University Library was rung
up and they lent their copy.

(End of the contribution by W. Eccles and W. Mays)

——–

During 1910 - 11 /Wittgenstein seems/ not to have been at any

University and Early in 1911 /Wittgenstein seems/ to have paid a
first visit to
Norway which was later to become his regular retreat. It
seems that during this interval he not only got interested
36 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 9 -

in mathematical logic but also made the acquaintance

(personal or by letter?) of Gotthold [sic] Frege. (There is no
evidence that he studied with Frege at Jena and he certain-
ly was not registered there as a student or even that he
visited Frege there at that time. Wittgenstein mentioned
later to several friends that it had been Frege who had
advised him to go to Cambridge to work with Bertrand Russell.

Wittgenstein probably arrived in Cambridge in the autumn

of 1911, though he did not matriculate at Trinity College
until the first term of 1912. During this term he attended
Russells lectures on the foundations of mathematics and
G. E. Moore’s on Psychology and soon was on a footing of
friendship with those two men who were seventeen and sixteen
years respectively his seniors (Wittgenstein then being
twenty- three years of age). Russell has recorded in Mind
that "quite at first (he) was in doubt whether (Wittgenstein)
was a man of genius or a crank, but very soon decided in
favour of the former alternative. Some of his early views
made the decision difficult."2 Moore seems sooner to have
been favourably impressed by Wittgenstein as "the only man
who looked puzzled at (his) lectures."3 Wittgenstein soon
began to visit Russell and Moore frequently at their rooms
and they in turn came to see him at his lodgings in Rose’s
crescent. During the first spring in Cambridge he devoted
much of his time to experimental work in the Psychological
Laboratory, investigating the extent and importance of
rythm in music. The work did not, as he had hoped, throw
light on problems of aesthetics, but did establish a point
of some interest, namely that, in some circumstances, all
the subjects heard an accent on certain notes which were
not in fact accented by the machine which was being used.

Through Russell Wittgenstein soon made the acquaintance of

a mathematics student at Trinity College, David Pinsent,
who was two years his junior and who shared his interest
in philosophy and music. A diary4 which Pinsent kept is our
main source for Wittgenstein’s movements and activities
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 37

- 10 -

during the next two years.1) At first, during May, Pinsent

served as subject in Wittgenstein’s experiments. But the
latter was, as Pinsent records, then beginning to work
seriously at Philosophy. A propos a discussion at Russell’s
rooms in the late evening Pinsent noted
Wittgenstein was very amusing: he is reading philo-
sophy up here, but has only just started systematic rea-
ding;5 and he expresses the most naive6 surprise that
all the philosophers7 he once worshipped in his igno-
rance,8 are after all stupid and ignorant, and9 make
disgusting mistakes.10

After only a month’s acquaintance Wittgenstein surprised

Pinsent by an invitation to accompany him during the follo-
wing September on a tour to Iceland to be made at the expense
of Wittgenstein’s father. A day after this sudden invitation,
at Wittgenstein’s rooms after a concert, the latter
was very communicative and told me a lot11 about himself;12
that for nine years, till last Xmas, he suffered from
terrible13 loneliness (mental, not physical)14 ; that15 he
continually thought of suicide then16 and felt ashamed of
never daring to kill himself;17 he put it that he had had
’a hint that he was de trop18 in this world’19 but that he
had meanly disregarded it. He had been brought up to
engineering, for which he had neither taste nor talent.
And only recently he had tried Philosophy and had come20
up here to study under Russell.21 Russell, I know, has a
high opinion of him; and he has22 been corrected by him
and convinced that he (Russell) was wrong in one or
two points of philosophy;23 and Russell is not the only
philosophical don up here that Wittgenstein has convin-
ced of error. Wittgenstein has few hobbies, which
rather accounts for his loneliness. One can’t thrive
entirely on big and important pursuits like Triposes.
But he is quite interesting and pleasant: I fancy he
has got quite over his morbidness now.

In June Russel [sic] went away from Cambridge while Wittgenstein

stayed on until the middle of July and soon began to write
to Russell:

1) This diary is now in the possession of Pinsent’s sister,

/Lady/ Mrs. H.A. Adrian, who kindly supplied extracts of the pas-
sages referring to Wittgenstein.
38 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 11 -

"Dear Mr.24 Russell", runs his first letter "I feel25 much
tempted to write to you although I have very little to
say. I have just been reading a part of Moore’s Princi-
pia Ethica26 (now please don’t be shocked) I do not27 like
it at all. (Mind you, quite apart from disagreeing
with most of it).28 I don’t believe – or rather I am
sure – that it cannot29 dream of comparing with Frege’s
or your own work30 (except perhaps some of the Philo-
sophical31 Essays). Moore repeats himself dozens of times,
what he says in three32 pages could – I believe – easily
be expressed in half a page. Unclear statements don’t
get a bit clearer by being repeated!!33 The concert on34
the 7th35 of June was most gorgeous,36 I wish you had heard
it. I need not say that I miss you awfully and that I
wish I knew how you are and that I am Yours most37 etc.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

This letter was soon followed by a second dated June 22nd:

Dear Russell, – There are38 nice events happening in
one’s life,39 e.g. getting40 a letter from you (thanks
very much for it). Much less nice is the following
event: I had a discussion with Myers about the relation41
between Logic and42 Psychology. I was very candid and43 I
am sure he thinks44 I am the most arrogant devil who ever
lived. Poor Mrs.45 Myers who was also present got – I
think – quite wild46 about me. However, I think, he was
a bit less confused after the discussion than before.
– Whenever I have time now I47 read James’ ’Varieties of
religious exp..48 This book does me a lot of good. I
don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I
am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a
way49 I would50 to improve very much: namely I think that
it helps me to get rid of51 Sorge (in the sense in which
Goethe used the word in the second52 part of Faust).
Logic is still in the melting pot but one53 thing gets
more and54 more obvious to me: The props of Logic contain
only apparent55 variables and56 whatever may turn out to
be the proper explanation of apparant variables, its57
consequence must be that there are no logical58 constants.
Logic must turn out to be59 a totally60 different kind than
any other science.
The peace (sic) of poetry which you sent me is most
splendid.61 Do62 come to Cambridge soon.

Four other but shorter letters which Wittgenstein wrote to

Russell during the summer, first from Cambridge and later
from Austria, deal almost exclusively with the logical prob-
lems on which he was then speculating. Before he left Cam-
bridge to spend the rest of July and August on the family
estate in Lower Austria he read a paper on his work to a
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 39

- 12 -

psychological meeting and started buying furniture for the

rooms at Whewell Court of Trinity College into which he was
to move in the following term. Pinsent helped him on these
shopping expeditions which he describes as
rather amusing: he is terribly fastidious and we led
the shopman a frightful dance, Wittgenstein ejacula-
ting "No – Beastly" to 90 % of what he showed us.63

Early in September Wittgenstein and Pinsent met in London

for their trip to Iceland where they spent a fortnight, tra-
velling over the country on ponies with as much comfort as
money could buy. Wittgenstein, though somewhat fussy and
occasionally irritable, certainly gave his younger companion
a good time on this trip on which there was "no sparing of
expenses": the "huge cavalcade" of eight ponies with the
two young men and their guides moved about attracting some
ironic attention from other more modest travelers. Wittgen-
stein, in turn, would occasionally take so violent a dislike
of some stranger that the two would have their meals served
in their rooms rather than take the risk of having to share
the table with the objectionable person. He also showed
an enormous horror of what he calls a Philistine64 atti-
tude towards cruelty and suffering – any callous atti-
tude – and accuses Kipling of such: and he got the
idea that I sympathised with it.

And again:
Wittgenstein has been talking a lot, at different times,
about Philistines,65 a name he gives to all persons he
dislikes: I think some views66 I have expressed have struck
him as a bit philistine67 (views – that is – on practical
things, not philosophy, – for instance on the advantage
of this age over the past and so forth)68 , and he is rather
puzzled because he does not consider me really a Philistine
– and I don’t think he dislikes me! He satisfies himself
by saying that I shall think differently as soon69 I am
a bit older.70

In the evening Wittgenstein explained to Pinsent his new

ideas on Logic, and two or three weeks after their return
to Cambridge Pinsent records that Wittgenstein
40 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 13 -

explained to me a new solution he has discovered to a

problem (in his most fundamental Symbolic Logic)71 which
was puzzling him greatly in Iceland, and to which he
made a somewhat makeshift solution then. His latest is
quite different and covers more ground, and if sound
should revolutionize lots of Symbolic Logic: Russell,
he says, thinks it is sound, but says nobody will under-
stand it: I think I comprehend it myself, however (!).
If Wittgenstein’s solution works, he will be the first
to solve a problem which has puzzled Russell and Frege
for some years: it is the most masterly and convincing
solution, too.72

On his return to Cambridge Wittgenstein had settled in his

new rooms in Whewell’s Court of Trinity College, seeing a
great deal of Moore and Russell and making some new friends,
including W. E., Johnson, A. J. Dorward, the mathematicians
Hardy and Littlewood, and particularly J. M. Keynes. Profes-
sor Moore writes about this period:
At the beginning of the October term 1912, he came
again to some of my psychology lectures, but he was
very displeased with them because I was spending a great
deal of time in discussing Ward’s views that psychology
did not differ from the Natural Sciences in subject-
matter but only in point of view. He told me these lec-
tures were very bad – that what I ought to do was to
say that I thought, not to discuss what other people
had thought; and he came no more to my lectures. But
this did not prevent him from seeing a great deal of
me. He was very anxious at the beginning of this year
to improve the discussion of our philosophical society,
which is called the Moral Science Club, and he actually
persuaded the Club with the help of the secretary and
me, to adopt a new set of rules and to appoint me as
Chairman. He himself took a great part in these dis-
cussions.
In this year both he and I were still attending Russells
lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics; but Wittgen-
stein used also to go for hours to Russell’s rooms in
the evening to discuss Logic with him.73

It was probably also during this autumn that, as Professor

Moore recalls, Wittgenstein
arranged to be coached in Logic by W. E. Johnson; but
Johnson soon found that W. spent so much time in explai-
ning his own views that he (Johnson) felt that it was
more like being coached by W. than W. being coached by
him; and Johnson therefore soon put an end to the arrange-
ment.1)

1) The passage quoted are from a letter by Professor Moore

to the author.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 41

- 14 -

This did not prevent W., however, anonymously to provide the

funds for an allowance of £200 a year to enable Johnson to
cut down his teaching committments and to have more time for
his research. The details of this were arranged between Keynes
and Wittgenstein’s father so that Johnson should not know where
the money came from.1)

Of the younger men Pinsent appears to have remained Wittgen-

stein’s only close associate. They often went out on horseback
together, visited many concerts or made music together at
Pinsent’s rooms. The latter was a good pianist, while Wittgen-
stein accompanied him whistling, at which he was very adept.
Attempts to bring Wittgenstein together with other contempo-
raries were usually not a success. The following story recor-
ded by Pinsent is rather characteristic: At tea in Wittgen-
stein’s rooms
one F.74 also appeared, a man whom Wittgenstein75 dislikes
and believes to be dishonest- minded:76 he got very exited
trying to induce him to read some good book on some
exact science, and see what honest thought is. Which
would obviously be good for F.77 – as indeed for anyone - 78
but Wittgenstein was very overbearing and let F.79 know
exactly what he thought of him, and altogether talked
as he were his Director of Studies! F.80 took it very well
- evidently81 convinced that Wittgenstein was a lunatic.

All through the autumn Wittgenstein had had disturbing news

from home where his father, who for some time had been suffe-
ring from cancer, had undergone further surgical treatment.
So when term ended Wittgenstein left Cambridge for Vienna,
calling on the way on Frege in Jena. On December 26 he writes
from Vienna to Russell:
On arriving here I found my father very ill. There is no
hope that he may recover. These circumstances have – I
am afraid82 – rather lamed my thoughts and83 I am muddled
although84 I struggle against it.
I had a long discussion with Frege about our theory85 of
Symbolism of which, I think, he roughly understood the
general86 outline. He said he would think the matter over.
The complex- problem is now clearer to me and87 I hope very
much that I may solve it. I wish I knew how you are and88
what sort of time you are having, and all about you.89

1) R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, p. 162

42 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 15 -

After another brief letter on January 6th, 1913, he wrote again

to Russel [sic] on January 16th90 :
Thanks very much for both your kind letters! I cannot
yet tell you91 when I shall be able to come back to Cam-
bridge92 as the doctors are still quite uncertain about the
duration of my father’s93 illness. He has not got94 any
pains95 but feels on the whole very bad having constantly
high fever. This makes him so apathetic that one cannot
do him any good by sitting at his bed etc. And as this
was the only thing that I could ever do for him, I am
now perfectly useless here96 so the time of my staying
here depends entirely upon whether97 his98 illness will
take so rapid a course that I could not risk to leave
Vienna; or not. I hope I shall be able to decide this
in a week’s99 time and100 I have told Fletcher so.
101
I have changed my view102 on "atomic" complexes. I now think
that Qualities, Relations (like love103 ) etc. are all
copulae!104 That means I for instance analyse a subject-
predicate proposition, say105 "Socrates is human" into
"Socrates" and106 "something human107 ", (which I think is
not complex). The reason for this108 is a very fundamen-
tal one: I think109 there cannot be different types110
of things! In other words whatever can be symbolized
by a simple proper name must belong to one type. And
further: every theory of types must be rendered super-
fluous by a proper theory of symbolism111 : For instance
if I analyze the proposition112 Socrates is mortal into
Socrates, mortality and113 (xy) E (xy). I want114 a theory
of types to tell me that "mortality115 is Socrates" is
nonsensical, because if I treat Mortality116 as a proper
name (as I did) there is nothing to prevent me to make
the substitution the wrong way round.117
What I am most118 certain of is not however the correctness
of my present way of analysis, but of the fact that all
theory119 of types must be done away with by a theory of
symbolism120 showing121 what seems122 to be different kinds of
things are symbolizes123 by different kinds of symbols which
cannot possibly be substituted one on anothers place124 . I
hope I have made this fairly clear.125
I was very interested to hear your ideas126 about matter,
although127 I cannot imagine your way of working from sense-
date128 forward.
Mach writes such a horrid style that it makes me nearly
sick to read him; however, I am glad129 you think so much
of a countryman of mine130 .

Wittgenstein’s father died on the 20th131 of January and on the

next day Ludwig wrote to Russell:
He had the most beautiful132 death133 I can imagine; without
the slightest pain134 and falling asleep like a child! I
did not feel sad for a single moment during all these135
last hours, but most joyful and136 I think that this death
was worth a whole life.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 43

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Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge a few days later and for

the next few months Pinsent’s diary is again our main source.
On February 4th, while Wittgenstein was at Pinsent’s rooms
Russell appeard137 – to inform me of some alterations he is
making in the hours of his lecture138 – and he and Wittgen-
stein got talking – the latter explaining one of his
latest discoveries in the Fundamentals of Logic – a
discovery which, I gather, only occured to him this
morning, and which appears to be quite important and was
very interesting. Russell acquiesced in what he said
without a murmur.

A few days later Pinsent is trying

to translate into English a Review (Wittgenstein)139 has
just written on a book on Logic;140 he has written the
Review in German and gave me a rough translation. But
it was very difficult – the construction of the sen-
tence141 is so different, I suppose, in German to what it
is in French.142 And he insisted on the translation being
fairly literal.

During the Spring Wittgenstein seems to have seen, in addition

to Russell and Moore, more and more of Keynes. With Pinsent,
after an unsuccessful attempt of the latter to teach Wittgen-
stein to play tennis, he continued to go to many concerts and
for occasional outings on the river. But the only noticeable
event which Pinsent records during spring (on May 15) is that
Wittgenstein has been having himself mesmerized – by Dr.143
Rogers here. The idea is this. It is, I believe, true
that people are capable of special muscular effort while
under hypnotic trance: then why not also a special men-
tal effort.144 So when he (Wittgenstein) is under trance,
Rogers is to ask him certain questions about points
of Logic, about which Wittgenstein is not clear145 (cer-
tain uncertainties which no one has yet succeeded in
clearing up): and Wittgenstein146 hopes he will then be
able to see clearly. It sounds wild scheme.147
Wittgenstein148 has been twice to be hypnotized – but not
until the end of the second interview did Rogers succeed
in sending him to sleep: when he did, however, he did
it so thoroughly that it took 1 1/2 hours149 to wake him
up again completely. Wittgenstein150 says he was conscious
all the time – could hear Rogers talk – but absolutely
without will or strength: could not comprehend what was
said to him – could exert no muscular effort – felt
exactly as if he were under an aneasthetic.151 He felt
very drowsy for an hour after he left Rogers. It is
altogether a wonderful business. There can be no "Auto-
suggestion"152 about it – as Wittgenstein found himself153
44 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 17 -

getting drowsy, etc.,154 when he didn’t think Rogers was

trying to mesmerize him at all: – just after an attempt
had failed, and when he (Witt) thought the séance was
over and was preparing to go away – just talking about
other things for a moment before leaving.

Most of the summer of 1913 Wittgenstein spent on the family

estate at Hochreit (near Hohenberg in Lower Austria) occasio-
nally writing to Russell about his work which was going on
well:
every day my problems get clearer now and155 I feel rather
hopeful156 . All my progress comes out of the idea that
the indefinables of Logic are of the general kind (in
the same way as the so called Definitions of Logic are
general) and157 this again comes from the abolition of the
real variable. Perhaps you laugh at me for feeling so
sanguine at present: but although I have not solved one158
of my problems I feel very, very much nearer to the
solution of them all than I ever felt before (July 22)159

Wittgenstein had again asked Pinsent to accompany him on

a journey towards the end of the summer and the plan had
been to go to Spain. But when they met in London late in
August it became clear that Wittgenstein really preferred
to go to Norway and Pinsent readily assented. Wittgenstein
was full of the work he had accomplished and at once explained
to Pinsent
his latest discoveries in Logic. They are truly ama-
zing and have solved all the problems on which he
has been working unsatisfactorily for the last year.
He always has explained to me what he has been working
at, and it is exceedingly interesting to see how he
has gradually developed his work, each idea suggesting
a new suggestion, and finally leading to the system
he has just discovered – which is wonderfully simple
and ingenious and seems to clear up everything. Of
course he has upset a lot of Russell’s work160 – but
Russell would be the last to resent that, and really
the greatness of his work suffers little thereby,161 as
it is obvious that Wittgenstein is one of Russell’s
disciples and owes enormously to him. But Wittgenstein’s
work is truely162 amazing – and I really believe that
the mucky morass of Philosophy is at last crystali-
sing163 about a rigid theory of Logic – the only portion
of philosophy164 about which there is any possibility
of many165 knowing anything.166
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 45

- 18 -

Four days later, after Wittgenstein had been to Cambridge,

had visited the Whiteheads at Marlborough and Russell in
London, Pinsent continues:
It seems that both Russell and old Whitehead are most
enthusiastic about his recent work in Logic. It is
probable that the first volume of the "Principia"167
will have to be re- written, and Wittgenstein may write
himself the first eleven chapters. That is a splendid
triumph for him!

On August, 30 the two friends sailed for Christiania (Oslo)

and from there proceded by train to Bergen. Here their in-
quieries for a
small hotel, somewhere168 on a fjord, amongs169 pleasant
country and170 where we can be quite alone from tourists171
(upon this Wittgenstein is very firm)172

was answered by the recomandation of Öistesjö on the Har-

danger Fjord
a tiny village in a little bay of the fjord173 with hills
rising straight behind.

The place which they reached in a few hours by steamer

proved satisfactory and they settled down there for a little
over three weeks, Wittgenstein working on his Logic and
Pinsent on Law, with some sailing during the day and music
(mostly Schubert songs with Pinsent playing the piano and
Wittgenstein whistling) and dominoes in the evening. At
first Wittgenstein was
in a really174 awful neurotic state: this evening blamed175
himself violently and expressed the most piteous
disgust with himself. At first I was rather annoyed
with him – it seemed to me that his feelings were
silly and rather selfish. But afterwards I could
only pity him – it is obvious he is quite incapable
of helping these fits. I only hope an outdoor life176
will make him better: at present it is no exaggera-
tion to say he is as bad (in that nervous sensibility)177
as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of
having at times contemplated suicide.

But he rapidly recovered and in the end said that he had

never enjoyed holidays as much as these. Work progressed
46 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 19 -

well. Already on the day after their arrival he wrote

to Russell:
I am sitting178 here in a little place inside a beauti-
ful fjord and179 thinking about the beastly theory
of types. There are still some very difficult problems
(and180 very fundamental ones too) to be solved and181 I
won’t begin to write until182 I have got some sort of183
solution for them. However I don’t think that will
in any way effect the Bipolarity business184 which185
seems to me still186 to be absolutely untangible (?)187
Pinsent is an enormous comfort to me here. We have
hired a little sailing boat and188 go about with it
on the fjord189 , or rather Pinsent is doing all the
sailing and190 I sit in the boat and191 work. Shall I
get anything out??192 It would be awful193 if I did not
and194 all my work would be lost. However I am not
losing195 courage and196 go on thinking. Pray for me!
(Sept. 5)

Twelve days later, when Wittgenstein seemed to have

another attack of depressions, Pinsent recorded on a
stroll they
got talking and it appeared that it had been some
serious197 difficulty with the ’theory of types’198 that
had depressed him all day today.199 He is morbidly
afraid he may die200 before he has written out all
his other work in such a way as shall be intelli-
gible to the world and of some use to the science
of Logic. He has written a lot already and Russell
has promised to publish his work if he were to die,201
but he is sure that what he has already written is
not sufficiently well put, so as to absolutely to
make plain his real methods of thought, etc. which,
of course, are202 of more value than his definite re-
sults. He is always saying that he will203 die within
four years,204 but today it was two months.

Only a little later (Sept. 20) Wittgenstein himself repor-

ted similarly to Russell:
Types are not yet solved but I have had all sorts
of ideas which seem to me very fundamental. Now205 the
feeling that I should206 have to die207 before being208 able
to publish them is growing stronger and209 stronger in
me every day and210 my greatest wish would therefore211 be
to communicate everything I have d ne212 so far to you,
as soon as possible. Don’t think that I believe that
my ideas are very important but I cannot help feeling
that they might help people to avoid some errors. Or
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 47

- 20 -

am I mistaken? If213 so don’t take any notice of this

letter. I have of course no judgement at all to214
whether my ideas are worth preserving after my death
or not. And perhaps it is ridiculous of me even to
consider this question at all. But if this is ridi-
culous please try to excuse this foolishness of mine215
because it is not a superficial foolishness but the
deepest of which I am capable. I see that the further
I get on with this letter the less I dare216 to come to
my point217 .218 I want to ask you to let me meet you as
soon as possible and219 give me time enough to give
you a survey of the whole field of what I have done
up to now and220 if possible to let me make notes for
you in your present221 . I shall arrive in London on the
first of October and222 shall have to be in London again
on October 3rd223 (evening). Otherwise I am not fixed
in any way and224 can meet you wherever you like. My
address will be the Grand Hotel.
225
I know that it may be both arrogant and226 silly to
ask you what I have asked you. But such I am and
think of me what you like. I will always be Yours,227 L. W.

From an endorsement of the letter by Russell it appears

that he proposed October 4th for the interview.

In the meantime Wittgenstein in Norway conceived of a new

idea and shortly before their departure surprised his
friend by suddenly announcing
a scheme of the most alarming nature. To wit: That228
he should exile himself and live for some years right
away from everybody he knows – say in Norway. That
he should live entirely alone and by himself – a
hermit’s life – and do nothing but work in Logic.
His reasons for this are very queer to me, but229 no
doubt they are very real for him: firstly, he thinks
he will do infinitely more and better work in such
circumstances230 than at Cambridge, where, he says, his
constant liability to interruption and distraction231
(such as concerts) is an awful hindrance. Secondly
he feels that he has no right to live in an antipa-
thetic world (and of course to him very few people
are sympathetic) – a world where he perpetually
finds himself feeling contempt for others, and irri-
tating others by his nervous temperament – without
some justification for that contempt, etc.,232 such as
being a really great man and having done really
great work. The first of the above reasons I cannot
understand – I should go wild with boredom if I lived
48 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 21 -

alone, and be unable to do any work without some dis-

traction. But I believe he really is different and
could easily stand it. The second reason above I
consider quite Quixotic: but he feels it very strong-
ly all the same. He has not definitely made up his
mind, but233 there is great possibility234 of his adopting
the scheme eventually.

On the return journey Wittgenstein made at Bergen some

inquiries about a suitable place in Norway where to settle.
But that it was still a distant and uncertain plan is
shown by the fact that during most of the journey he was
working with Pinsent on an introductory lecture for a
course on philosophy he had undertaken to give at the
Working Men’s College in London. What decided him to
carry out his plan was that on arrival at London 1st
he received news that a close relative was coming to live
in London. So about a forthnight later, after a visit to
Cambridge for his talk with Russell, as a result of which
he sent him a set of typed Notes on Logic1), and after he
had arranged with Moore to visit him in Norway in the
following spring, he left for Skjolden on the Sogne Fjord,
north of Bergen.235 Here he remained alone, apart from a
short visit to Vienna at Christmas, very unwillingly un-
dertaken to please his mother. He wrote fairly regularly
to Russell and Pinsent, but only the set of letters to
the former have been preserved, dealing mainly with Logic.
The first is from October 29, 1913:
This is an ideal place to work in. – Soon after I
arrived here I got violent influenza which prevented
me from doing any work until recently236 . Identity is
the very Devil and237 immensely important: very238 much
more so than I thought. It hangs – like everything
else – directly togethter239 with the most fundamental
questions240 concerning the occurrence241 of the same242 argu-

1) These notes and those which Wittgenstein dictated to Moore

in the following spring have been preserved and will be used,
together with Wittgenstein’s letters to Russell, in the
study on the development of Wittgenstein’s Logic undertaken
by Professor D. S. Shwayder of the University of California,
Berkely, Calif.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 49

- 22 -

ment in different places.243 I have all sorts of ideas

for a solution of the problem but could not yet arrive
at anything definite.244
I have got two nice rooms here in the Postmaster’s245
house and246 am looked after very well indeed. By the
way – would you be so good and247 send me two copies of
Moore’s paper: "The Nature and248 Reality of Objects of
Perception" which he read to the Aristotelian Society249
in 1906. I am afraid250 I can’t tell251 you the reason why
I want252 two copies but you shall know253 some day. ...254
As I hardly met255 a soul in this place, the progress
of my Norwegian is exceedingly slow; so much so that
I have not yet learnt256 a single swear word!

Wittgenstein did much work during this winter and began

to write out his ideas at length. In his large scrawling
hand he filled one folio account book after another and
in the course of the next four or five years accumulated
seven such volumes of which the Tractatus is the final
extract. Russell soon send him a copy of the Notes on
Logic Wittgenstein had left with him, with a long series
of questions which the latter answered in great detail.
The third letter of November, begins:
I intended to write this letter in German, but it
struck me that I did not know whether to call you
’Sie’ or ’Du’ and257 so I am reduced to my beastly Eng-
lish258 jargon!!259

Russell evidently answered as one would expect and so

Wittgenstein’s further letters of the next two years are
all written in German, using the familiar ’Du’. The first
of these, of late 1913, begins:
Vielen260 Dank für Deinen lieben Brief. Ich will dasje-
nige, was ich in meinem letzten Brief über Logik
schrieb, noch einmal in anderer Weise wiederholen.261
Alle Sätze der Logik sind Verallgemeinerungen von
Tautologien und alle Verallgemeinerungen von Tauto-
logien sind Sätze der Logik. Andere Sätze der Logik
gibt es nicht.262 (Dies halte ich für definitiv).263 Ein
Satz wie "(∃ x)(x=x) zum Beispiel264 ist eigentlich ein
Satz der Physik265 . Der Satz "(x) :x=x:⊃ (∃ y) = y"266 ist ein
Satz der Logik. Es ist nun Sache der Physik267 zu sagen,
ob es ein Ding giebt.268 Dasselbe gilt vom infinity axiom;269
ob es270 Dinge giebt, das zu bestimmen ist Sache der
Erfahrung (und die kann es nicht entscheiden). Nun
50 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

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aber zu Deinem Reduction271 - Axiom: .....272 Ich bitte Dich,273

denke selbst über die Sachen nach, es ist mir schreck-
lich274 eine schriftliche Erklärung zu wiederholen,275 die
ich schon zum ersten Mal mit dem allergrössten Wider-
streben276 gegeben habe. Die Identität ist mir – 277 wie
gesagt – noch nicht ganz klar.278 Also hierüber ein an-
dermal! Wenn Dein Axiom der Reduction279 fällt, so wird
wahrscheinlich manches geändert werden müssen280 . ....281
Die Einsamkeit hier tut mir unendlich wohl282 und ich
glaube, dass283 ich das Leben unter Menschen jetzt nicht
vertrüge. In mir gährt alles.284 Die grosse285 Frage ist
jetzt: Wie muss286 ein Zeichensystem beschaffen sein,
damit es jede Tautologie auf eine und dieselbe Weise287
als Tautologie erkennen lässt? Dies ist das Grundprob-
lem der Logik! ich288 bin überzeugt, ich werde in meinem
Leben nie etwas veröffentlichen. Aber nach meinem
Tod musst289 Du den Band meines Tagebuches290 , worin die
ganze Geschichte steht, drucken lassen. Schreib bald
hierher und versuche aus meinen verwirrten Erklärun-
gen klar zu werden.

On the 15th of December Wittgenstein wrote again:

Die Frage nach dem291 Wesen der Identität lässt292 sich
nicht beantworten, ehe das Wesen der Tautologie er-
klärt ist. Die Frage nach diesem aber, ist die Grund-
lage293 aller Logik. —294 Mein Tag vergeht zwischen Logik,
Pfeifen, Spaziergehen und295 Niedergeschlagensein. Ich
wollte zu Gott296 ich hätte mehr Verstand und297 es würde
mir nun endlich alles klar:298 oder ich müsste299 nicht mehr
lange leben!300
Du hast die Eroica gehört! Was hast Du zum301 zweiten
Satz gesagt? Ist302 er nicht unglaublich?303
Ist es nicht höchst merkwürdig was für eine grosse304
und305 unendlich eigenartige Wissenschaft die Logik ist,306
ich glaube307 weder Du noch ich haben das vor 1 1/2308
Jahren gewusst.309

After a short letter from Vienna he writes again in January

from Skolden:
Vielen Dank für Deinen lieben Brief! Leider310 kann ich
Dir auch diesmal wieder keine311 logischen Neuigkeiten
berichten: denn es (ist312 mir in den letzten (?)313 fürch-
terlich schlecht gegangen (Eine Folge meiner Wiener
"Ferien").314 Ich war jeden Tag abwechselnd von schreck-
licher Angst und315 Depression gequält316 und selbst wenn
diese aussetzen317 so erschöpft, dass318 ich an eine Arbeit319
gar nicht denken konnte. Die Möglichkeiten der geisti-
gen Qual320 sind unendlich321 entsetzlich! Erst seit zwei
Tagen kann ich wieder die Stimme der Vernunft durch
die Gespenster322 hören und habe wieder angefangen zu
arbeiten. Und vielleicht323 werde ich jetzt genesen
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 51

- 24 -

und324 etwas anständiges hervorbringen können. Aber ich

habe nie gewusst,325 was es heisst,326 sich nur noch einen327
Schritt vom Wahnsinn entfernt zu fühlen.328 Hoffen wir
das Beste–329
Ja, Mörike ist freilich ein grosser330 Dichter und seine
Gedichte gehören zum Besten331 was wir haben. Aber ich
bin neugierig, ob Du ihn wirklich geniessen332 wirst,
weil Du doch Goethe nicht geniessest.333 Und Mörikes
Schönheit ist ganz nahe verwandt mit Goethes. Aber
wenn Du Mörike wirklich genossen hast,334 dann versuch335
einmal die Iphigenie von Goethe: vielleicht geht Dir
dann ein Licht auf.
Jetzt noch eine Frage: Sagt der "Satz vom zureichenden
Grunde" (law336 of Causality) nicht einfach dass337 Raum und
Zeit relativ sind? Dies erscheint338 mir jetzt ganz klar
zu sein; denn alle die Ereignisse,339 von denen dieser
Satz behaupten soll, dass340 sie nicht eintreten können,
könnten überhaupt nur in einer absoluten Zeit und341
einem absoluten Raum eintreten. (Dies wäre freilich
noch kein unbedingter Grund zu meiner Behauptung.)342
Aber denke an den Fall des Massenteilchens, das, al-
lein in der Welt existierend, und seit aller Ewigkeit
in Ruhe, plötzlich im Zeitpunkt A anfänge343 sich zu be-
wegen,344 und denke an ähnliche Fälle, so wirst Du – 345
glaube ich sehen — dass keine346 Einsicht a priori uns
solche Ereignisse als unmöglich erscheinen lässt, aus-
ser eben in dem Fall dass347 Raum und Zeit relativ sind.
Bitte schreib mir Deine Meinung in diesem Punkte.

There seems to be a letter missing here to which the next

two refer. One is undated and probably preceded the other:
Ich danke Dir für Deinen freundlichen Brief. Es war
sehr schön von Dir dass348 Du mir auf diese Weise geant-
wortet hast! Deine Forderung aber, ich solle so tun
als sei nichts vorgefallen, kann ich Dir unmöglich
erfüllen, da dies ganz gegen meine Natur ginge. Ver-
zeih mir daher diesen langen Brief349 und
bedenke dass350 ich meiner Natur ebenso folgen muss,351 wie
Du der Deinen. Ich habe in den letzten Wochen352 viel
über unser Verhältnis nachgedacht und bin zu dem
Schluss gekommen, dass wir eigentlich nicht zueinander353
passen. Dies meine ich nicht als Tadel!354 weder für Dich
noch für mich. Aber es ist eine Tatsache. Wir hatten
ja schon oft355 ungemütliche Gespräche mit einander, wenn
wir auf gewisse Themen kamen. Und die Ungemütlichkeit
war nicht eine Folge von schlechter Laune auf seiten
eines von uns beiden, sondern sie war die Folge enormer
Unterschiede in unserem Wesen. Ich bitte Dich instän-
dig356 nicht zu glauben, ich wolle Dich irgendwie tadeln,
oder Dir eine Predigt halten,357 sondern ich will nur
unser Verhältnis klarlegen weil ich daraus einen
52 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Schluss ziehen werde.358

Auch unser letzter Streit war bestimmt nicht bloss359
die Folge von Empfindlichkeit360 oder meiner Rücksichts-
losigkeit, sondern der tiefere Grund lag darin, dass361
Dir jener Brief von mir zeigen musste,362 wie grundver-
schieden unsere Auffassungen z. B.363 des Wertes eines
wissenschaftlichen364 Werkes sind. Es war natürlich
dumm von mir, Dir damals so lang über jene Sache ge-
schrieben zu haben, denn ich hätte mir ja sagen müssen,365
dass366 sich solche wesentliche Unterschiede nicht durch
einen Brief ausgleichen lassen. Und dies ist ja nur
ein367 Fall unter vielen. Ich sehe jetzt, wo ich dies
in aller Ruhe schreibe, vollkommen ein, dass368 Deine
Werturteile eben so gut sind und eben so tief in Dir
begründet sind wie meine in mir, und dass369 ich kein
Recht habe Dich zu katechisieren,370 aber eben so klar
sehe ich jetzt, dass371 wir eben darum kein rechtes
Freundschaftsverhältnis zu einander haben können. Ich
werde Dir so lange ich lebe vom ganzen Herzen dankbar
sein,372 aber ich werde Dir nicht mehr schreiben und Du
wirst mich auch nicht mehr sehen. Jetzt wo ich mich
mit Dir wieder versöhnt habe, will ich in Frieden von
Dir scheiden, damit wir nicht irgend einmal wieder
gegen einander gereizt werden und dann vielleicht in
Feindschaft auseinander gehen. Ich wünsche Dir alles
Beste und bitte Dich mich nicht zu vergessen und oft
freundlich373 an mich zu denken. Leb wohl!374
Immer375 Dein Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The other letter is dated from the third of March:

Dein Brief war so voll376 von Güte und Freundschaft, dass377
ich nicht glaube, auf ihn schweigen zu dürfen. Ich muss378
also mein Vorheben379 brechen: was ich Dir aber sagen
muss,380 kann ich leider nicht kurz fassen und ich habe
kaum irgenwelche Hoffnung, dass381 Du mich wirklich
verstehen wirst. Vor allem muss ich noch einmal382 sagen:
Unsere Streitigkeiten kommen nicht nur383 aus äusserli-
chen Gründen, (Nervosität, Übermüdung und dergleichen)384
sondern sind – jedenfalls in mir – sehr tief begründet.385
Du magst darin recht haben, dass386 wir selbst viel-
leicht nicht einmal so sehr verschieden sind: aber
unsere Ideale sind es ganz und gar. Und darum konnten
und387 können wir nie über Dinge, worin unsere Werturtei-
le in Betracht kamen388 mit einander reden, ohne zu
heucheln389 oder zu zanken. Ich glaube dies lässt sich
nicht leugnen390 und war mir schon seit langer Zeit auf-
gefallen; und war mir schrecklich, denn unser Verkehr
bekam dadurch etwas vom Beisammensitzen in einem
Sumpfe. Denn wir beide haben Schwächen, besonders
aber ich und mein Leben ist voll von den hässlichsten
und kleinlichsten Gedanken und Taten391 (dies ist keine
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 53

- 26 -

Übertreibung). Wenn aber ein Verkehr nicht beide

Teile herabziehen soll, dann dürfen die Schwächen
(nicht?)392 mit einander verkehren. Sondern zwei Leute
sollen nur dort mit einander verkehren, wo sie beide
rein393 sind; d. i. dort wo sie gegeneinander ganz
offen sein können, ohne einander zu verletzen. Und
das können wir beide nur,394 wenn wir unseren Verkehr
auf die Mitteilung objektiv395 feststellbarer Tatsachen
beschränken und396 etwa noch auf die Mitteilung unserer
freundschaftlichen397 Gefühle. Alle anderen Themen aber
führen bei uns zur Heuchelei oder zum Zank. Du sagst
vielleicht: es ist ja bisher so ziemlich gegangen,
warum sollte es nicht so weiter gehen. Aber ich bin
des ewigen schmutzigen und halben zu398 müde! Mein Leben
war bisher eine grosse Schweinerei – aber soll es
immer so weitergehen? – 399 Ich schlage Dir nun dies vor:
Machen400 wir einander Mitteilungen über unsere Arbeiten,
unser Befinden und dergleichen, aber unterlassen
wir gegen einander jedwedes Werturteil – worüber
immer –,401 in dem vollen Bewusstsein, dass wir hierin
gegen einander nicht ganz ehrlich sein könnten, ohne
den anderen zu verletzen (zum mindesten gilt dies
bestimmt von Dir!)402 Meiner tiefen Zuneigung brauche
ich Dich nicht erst zu versichern, aber sie wäre in
grosser403 Gefahr, wenn wir mit einem Verkehr fortführen,
der Heuchelei zur Grundlage hat und404 deshalb für uns
beide beschämend ist. Aber ich glaube es405 wäre ehren-
voll für uns beide, wenn wir ihn auf einer reineren
Grundlage fortsetzten. – 406 Ich bitte Dich, Dir dies
alles zu überlegen, mir aber nur dann407 zu antworten,
wenn Du es im guten tun kannst. In jedem Fall sei
meiner Liebe und408 Treue versichert. Möchtest Du diesen
Brief so verstehen wie er gemeint ist!
Immer Dein Ludwig Wittgenstein.409

There seems to have been no further letters from Wittgen-

stein to Russell during the next few months (Russell, I
believe, was in America at the time). In the early spring
Wittgenstein received the promised visit from G. E. Moore
who writes
I arrived at Bergen late on March 26, 1914, and found
W. there to meet me. We spent two nights at Bergen,
and then went on by train, sledge, steamer and motor
boat to Skolden, where Wittg. was staying, spending
one night on the way at Flaam, at a hotel which was
mostly shut up, because it was out of season: W. had
arranged beforehand that we should be able to sleep
there, but we were the only guests. I was with him
at Skolden only 15 days. He dictated to me there
54 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 27 -

some Notes on Logic, which I still have and which I

let von Wright see recently. He also took me to a
site where he proposed to build a house; but the
house which he afterwards actually built near Skolden
was on a different site. At the end of 15 days he
occupied me back to Bergen, and we again spent one
night together at Flaam, and one night at Bergen.
It was during this visit that I first learnt that
W. suffered from a rupture & had to wear a special
kind of belt: he bought a belt of the right kind at
Bergen.410

Early in summer Wittgenstein wrote once more to Russell

from Norway:
Nur ein paar Zeilen um Dir zu sagen dass411 ich Deinen
lieben412 Brief erhalten habe und dass413 meine Arbeit in
den letzten 4 - 5 Monaten grosse414 Fortschritte gemacht
hat. Jetzt aber bin ich wieder in einem Zustand der
Ermüdung und kann weder arbeiten415 noch meine Arbeit
erklären. Ich habe sie aber Moore als er bei mir war
ausführlich416 erklärt und417 er hat sich verschiedenes
aufgeschrieben. Du wirst also alles am besten von
ihm erfahren können. Es ist viel neues.418 Am besten
wirst Du alles verstehen wenn Du Moores Aufzeichnun-
gen selber liest.419 Es wird jetzt wohl420 wieder einige
Zeit dauern bis ich wieder etwas hervorbringe.421
PS.422 Ich baue mir jetzt hier ein kleines Haus in der
Einsamkeit. Hoffentlich war Deine Reise erfolgreich.

In June or July 1914 Wittgenstein returned to Austria and

spent some weeks at the Hochreit estate. In July he was
still writing to Pinsent about another joint holiday plan-
ned for the end of August. At the same time he was evident-
ly worrying about what to do with the very large fortune
which he had inherited from his father. His intention then
was to retain only the part of it which was invested in
government securities and to give away what must have been
the much larger part invested in industrial shares. It was
apparently in the pursuit of this plan that he wrote to
Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the literary review
Der Brenner, who was personally unknown to him but whose
work he had seen praised in Karl Kraus’ Die Fackel, that
he was proposing to send him the substantial sum of
100.000 Kronen (about $ 20.000) for distribution among
Austrian poets and artists who in Ficker’s opinion deserved
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 55

- 28 -

and needed such help. The correspondence led to a meeting

between Wittgenstein and Ficker at the Wittgenstein villa
in the suburbs of Vienna, at which it was agreed that one
fifth of this amount should go to each of the two poets
Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, who were however not
to know of the source from which the money came. On the
following day, a Sunday and the eve of the Austrian decla-
ration of war to Serbia, Ficker introduced Wittgenstein at
a Vienna cafee to the architect Adolf Loos, whose much
discussed modern building greatly interested Wittgenstein
and with whom he remained in contact.

On the outbreak of war Wittgenstein first seems to have

wished to return to Norway, but when this proved impossible
he at once undertook voluntary civilian work and a few
days later volunteered for the army, although his physical
defect (a double rupture in the groins) would probably
have exempted him permanently from military duty. He also
waved the privilge, to which his education would have
entitled him, of being trained as an officer. For about
two years he served as a private with a motorized artillery
group, at first on a rive craft (the "Goplana") on the
Vistula and later in the fortress of Krakau (Cracow). Little
is known of his activities during these two years, though
we get an occasional glimpse of Private Wittgenstein peeling
potatoes on the deck of the "Goplana" on a beautiful sum-
mer night and on the same time discussing on philosophy
with an interested officer, or of his being employed in a
workshop in Krakau, apparently using his knowledge of in-
ternal combustion engines. At one time during this period
his concealed bodily defect was giving serious trouble and
at another he was badly hurt by an explosion but without
lasting effect. His duties seem to have left him time to
do a considerable amount of work, and during the first year
it was also still possible for him to write about it to
Russell and Pinsent in England, at first directly and
later through the Red Cross. A copy of Russell’s article
56 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 29 -

on "The Relation of Sense- Data to Physics" (Scientia 1914,

No. 4) also still reached him. It must have been during
this period also that, as he later told Russell, he bought
in a bookshop in a village in Galicia the single book that
was left, Tolstoy on the Gospels, which affected him pro-
foundly.

In 1916 he was ordered to an officer training course at

Olmütz (Olomouc) in Moravia. An introduction which Adolf
Loos had given him to a young pupil who was living there,
Paul Engelmann, brought him in touch with a congenial soul
who not only had also recently come under the influence
of the religious ideas of Tolstoy but who also proved a
sympathetic and helpful listener to the exposition of
his philosophical ideas. Wittgenstein would even occasio-
nally join in the fun of the young men on furlough, in the
hospitable home of Engelmann’s parents, and after these
parties the two young men would often walk for long hours
to and from between the Engelmann home and Wittgenstein’s
lodgings, talking about the ideas of the growing Tractatus
and about the common ethical and aesthetical interests.
Though for Engelmann this was a first introduction into
philosophy, he proved to be a good listener and questioner;
and Wittgenstein acknowledged that when he was struggling
for the right expression, Engelmann’s skillful questioning
would often at last force it out of him.
From Olmütz Wittgenstein at first returned to the Eastern
front, but from the spring of 1918 he served with a mountain
artillery regiment in the South Tyrol – somewhat unhappy
about the status of an officer which had been forced upon
him and which he repeatedly tried to resign. In August
1918, on leave in Vienna, he was able to dictate the final
version of the Tractatus to a typist and he carried this
typescript in the Rucksack when, at the collapse of the
Austro- Hungarian army in November, he was taken prisoner
by the Italians. He was first taken to a prisoner of war
camp at Como and in January 1919 to another one at Monte
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 57

- 30 -

Casino [sic]. Here he was able to do some further work on the

manuscript. Already at Como he had made friends with a
fellow prisoner, the sculptor M. Dobril [sic] from Vienna,
and at Monte Casino he found another congenial Viennese,
Dr. Ludwig Haensel. Both men became his lifelong friends.
The acquaintance with Dr. Haensel came about when, after
one of the lectures on Logic which the latter was giving
for a group of prisoners who were preparing themselves
to become teachers, a silent listener who turned out to
be Wittgenstein introduced himself to explain to Haensel
one of the problems he had been discussing. This led to
regular discussions in the course of which Wittgenstein
not only took Haensel systematically through the elements
of symbolic logic but also, during long evening walks,
explained the ideas of the Tractatus. Apparently some
ideas to the manuscript (including the schemata of 6.1203)
originated in these discussions. They also read together
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, mostly by Wittgenstein
reading aloud to Haensel, which he always liked doing and
did extremely well. Another topic for lively discussion
was provided by Wittgenstein discovering in the camp a
copy of the Bible and reading, apparently for the first
time, the original version of the Gospels. He had been so
impressed by Tolstoy’s interpretation that he was greatly
disturbed by much he found in the original and was only
with difficulty convinced of its genuiness. – It was
also during this period that, when an epidemic of Typhoid
broke out in a prison camp for ordinary soldiers in the
neighbourhood, Wittgenstein volunteered as hospital help
and was much upset when his offer was rather rudely refused.

In February 1919 he was able to send a first postcard to

Bertrand Russell, expressing anxiety to let him know about
the work he had done and soon followed by another. A first
letter, apparently of April,423 speaks again of the manuscript,
58 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 31 -

containing all my work of the last six424 years. I believe

that I’ve solved425 our problems finally. This may sound
arrogant but I cannot426 help believing it. I finished the
book in August 1918 and427 two months after was made Bri-
gionere.428 I’ve got the manuscript here with me. I wish I
could copy it out for you; but it’s pretty long and429 I
would have no safe way of sending it to you. In fact
you would not understand it without a previous explana-
tion as it’s written in quite short remarks. (This of
course means that nobody will understand it: although430
I believe431 it’s all as clear as crystall432 ). I will publish
it as soon as I get home. Now I’m afraid this won’t433 be
’before long’.434 And consequently it will be a long time
till435 we can meet. I can hardly imagine seeing you again!
It will be too much! I suppose it would be impossible
for you to come and see me here? Or perhaps you think
it’s colossal cheek of me even to think of such a thing.
But if you were on the other end of the world and436 I
could come to you I would do it.

Russell pulled strings to get Wittgenstein released by the

Italians, but when he succeeded, the latter, who did not wish
to be repatriated before his fellow- prisoners, prevented it
by vehemently declaring to an astonished Italian physician,
who was willing enough to certify that W. could not stand
prolonged confinement, that he was in perfect health. About
the beginning of June 1919 J. M. Keynes was able to arrange
for Wittgenstein to send his manuscript to Russell and it
was probably through the same channel that a set of sheets
of Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy published
in May of that year, reached Wittgenstein. Commenting on it he
wrote to Russell on June 6th:437
Ich hätte nicht geglaubt, dass438 das, was ich vor 6 Jahren439
dem Moore diktierte an Dir so spurlos vorübergehen würde.440
Und der geringe Rest von Hoffnung mein Manuskript könnte441
Dir etwas sagen, ist ganz verschwunden. Einen Kommentar442
zu meinem Buche443 zu schreiben, bin ich wie Du Dir denken
kannst nicht imstande.444 Nur mündlich könnte ich Dir einen
geben. Ist Dir irgend an dem Verständnis der Sache etwas
gelegen und kannst Du ein Zusammentreffen mit mir bewerk-
stelligen, so bitte tue es. – 445 Ist dies nicht möglich,
so sei so gut und schicke das Manuskript446 so bald Du es
gelesen hast nach447 Wien zurück. Es ist das einzige korri-
gierte Exemplar, welches ich besitze und die Arbeit meines
Lebens! Mehr als je brenne ich jetzt448 darauf, es449 gedruckt
zu sehen. Es ist bitter, das vollendete Werk in der Ge-
fangenschaft herumschleppen zu müssen und zu sehen wie450
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 59

- 32 -

der Unsinn draussen451 sein Spiel treibt! Und ebenso bitter

ist es zu denken, dass452 niemand es verstehen wird, auch
wenn es gedruckt sein wird.453

On August 19th, in the expectation of starting for home two

days later, he wrote once more from Casino [sic] in reply to a
letter
from Russell and at considerable length. He mentions inciden-
tally:
I also sent my M. S. to Frege. He wrote me a week ago
and454 I gather that he doesn’t understand a word of it all.
So my only hope is to see you soon and to explain455 all
to you, for it is very456 hard not to be understood by a
single soul!457

Though the letter discusses some of the technical points

raised by Russell about the contents of the manuscript, it
is mainly a plea to him to arrange for a meeting in Switzer-
land or Holland as soon as possible. Russell did and the two
men met in the autumn in The Hague and, as Russell reports,
"discussed the Tractatus line by line."

In order to finance Wittgenstein’s trip to The Hague Russell

had to buy from him the furniture he had stored in Cambridge.
This was not only because Austria was then in the throes of a
violent inflation but mainly because Wittgenstein’s first
concern on his return from captivity had been to divest him-
self of the whole of the considerable fortune he had inherited.
Even before the war he had occasionally expressed his inten-
tion of giving away all his holdings of industrial stock and
retaining only what had been invested in government securities
(which in the summer of 1919 were on the point of becoming
worthless). Now, after causing considerable commotion at his
bankers by one day appearing to declare that he no longer
wanted any of his money, he proceeded to the formal steps
necessary to distribute the whole of his property among two
of his sisters and his surviving brother. So passionately
anxious was he that never again should any part of it come
under his control that special measures had to be taken that
the part of the securities which were still under sequestra-
tion in an ex- enemy country should under no circumstances
later come into his hands.
60 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 33 -

Already while in the prison camp Wittgenstein had decided that

on his return he would become a school teacher and back in
Vienna he at once registered for a one year’s training course
and in July 1920 passed the examination qualifying him as an
elementary school teacher. During the following summer he
worked for a time as a gardener’s apprentice in the monastery
of Klosterneuburg near Vienna, and in September he started
for the first of his teaching posts in a village in the hills
four hours south of Vienna. Soon he was writing from there
to Russell who had gone to China, commentating that it was
probably the first time that the schoolmaster of Trattenbach
was corresponding with a Professor of the University of Peking.

During the preceding spring they had been corresponding about

the publication of the manuscript. In April Wittgenstein acknow-
ledged the receipt of the Introduction. Russell had writ-
ten for it at his request. But a month later, after the Intro-
duction had been translated he wrote again to Russell to ex-
plain that he could not bring himself to have it included in
the book, since in the process of translation all the beauty
of Russell’s English had got lost and all that remained "was
superficiality and misunderstanding". As Wittgenstein had
rather expected, the German publishers with whom he had been
negociating (Reclam) then rejected the book and Wittgenstein
seems himself to have made no further effort to get it published.
Russel [sic] then placed it with the Annalen der Naturphilosophie,
edited by Wilhelm Ostwals [sic] (of whome Wittgenstein had no very
favourable opinion), and at the end of 1921 the Logisch-
Philosophische Abhandlung appeared, with Russell’s preface,
in the last complete issue of that journal.

There were only a few more letters exchanged between the two
friends after this. In his first letter from Trattenbach Witt-
genstein had reported that the new task had brought some re-
lief from the severe depression under which he had been suf-
fering. But the retreat among the ordinary people was not an
unmixed success. A year later, in another letter to Russel [sic],
then back in England, he says that he continues to be surroun-
ded by hatred and commoness and speaks of friction with some
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 61

- 34 -

people. There is also some mention of a contemplated visit

of Wittgenstein’s with Russell, but in the end the two men
appear to have met instead at Innsbruck in the summer of
1922. After this their close contact and correspondence
ceased. Wittgenstein, who before the war had himself been
strongly anti- Christian, had greatly changed in this respect.
The study of Tolstoy and St. Augustine had been among the
experiences which gradually had turned him, though not into
a dogmatic believer, yet, in a sense, a prof/o/undly religious
man. Russell’s strident rationalism now grated on his nerves
and after that stay in Innsbruck the two friends scarcely
met again.

It seems that in the same summer (or perhaps the next) Witt-
genstein also again visited Norway, though what he could
save from his salary as a teacher scarcely sufficed to pay
the single fare and he had to earn his keep there and the
cost of the return journey by working in a factory making
wooden boxes.

The two years which Wittgenstein spent in Trattenbach were

not too happy and he seems at the beginning of the second
year briefly to have tried another place (Hassbach) and to
have again returned to Trattenbach. It was inevitable that
to the villagers the odd figure so different from anything
they had seen should become an object of curiosity and gos-
sip: the delicate figure with the appearance of a penitent
saint, dressed more shabbily than was expected from a teacher
(invariably in a badly worn and soiled leather jacket and
trousers with heavy boots, yet with an immaculately clean
shirt) at the same time so unmistakably superior in intel-
ligence and education to any teacher they had known – a man
who lived the life of a hermit in a room furnished much like
a monk’s cell and who generally avoided contact with the people
and would occasionally be seen on a fine evening at the win-
dow gazing at the stars or playing the clarinet – a man,
usually shy and reticent, but given to outburst of sudden
anger and using very direct and strong language when annoyed –
62 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 35 -

must have appeared to them very strange indeed. Wittgenstein

was probably mistaken, however, when he felt himself the ob-
ject of general enmity or, as he once blurted out to a col-
league, thought that the people regarded him as a fool. It
is probably that with his fanatical truthfulness and direct-
ness, which treated the small conventions of ordinary life
as hypocrisy and insincerity, he often offended people; and
his colleagues may not always have cherished his exacting
standards, the outspokeness with which he criticized establi-
shed teaching practics, and perhaps took his isolation for
arrogance. The only person in the village with whom he felt
he could talk intelligently was the catholic priest whom in
later years he still often went to see and to whom he wrote
letters in Latin. He also grew very fond of an old peasant
woman with whom he used to take his midday meals and whom
he came to regard as one of the few real Christians he had
ever known.

He made however friends with a teacher in the neighbouring

village of Otterthal (where he was later himself to teach);
with him he spent most of his free days or went for lang
walks and talked freely on all his interests or became ab-
sorbed in determining flowers they had collected. He even
presented Oberlehrer Putre on the slightest provocation
with a copy of the Tractatus, though with the remark he was
sure his friend would never understand it. This friend also
remembers a counter- visit he and his wife paid to Wittgen-
stein on a cold autumn day: they found him in an unheated
room furnished with little more than a camp- bed, a chair,
a small table and an iron stove; and after Wittgenstein had
cut wood on the floor of the room and produced a fire, he
served them with cyder poured from a jug on the washstand
into an army tin- cup from which he had just removed his
toothbrush.

In the autumn of 1922 Wittgenstein was transferred to a

secondary school in the industrial town of Neunkirchen, but
he intensely disliked the atmosphere of pretended specialised
knowledge among its teachers and after a very few weeks
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 63

- 36 -

obtained an appointment at another elementary school in the

small town of Puchberg am Schneeberg. Here he was fortunate
in finding among his colleagues a young man who was an ac-
complished pianist and shared Wittgenstein’s musical tastes.
During the two years he remained at Puchberg he spent most
afternoons with Rudolf Koder, accompanying him on the clari-
net or just whistling the tune and yet largely guiding the
execution of his companion. The friendship was renewed when
the two men met again in Vienna and lasted until Wittgen-
stein’s death.

Apart from these afternoons devoted to music Wittgenstein was

almost entirely occupied with his teaching duties. He cared
little for the mountain landscape among which he lived and
which, unlike the barer and more severe scenery of Norway
and Ireland, did not appeal to him. He again taught mixed
classes of nine or ten years old, took his tasks very
seriously and was very exacting and conspicuously success-
ful, taking his charge somewhat beyond the required standard
and teaching them, e.g. in arithmetic, the rudiments of
equations. But again the recluse /who/ did not mix with the in-
habitants and who demanded an unusual amount of work from
his pupils and often kept them longer at school was not very
popular with the parents. And when, after two years, his
charges were to proceed to the secondary school at Puchberg,
he could not bear seeing his work spoiled by other hands and
applied for transfer to a still smaller place where he would
be able to see the children through the end of their education.

During the years in Trattenbach and Puchberg Wittgenstein ap-

pears to have had neither time nor the inclination for phi-
losophical work and to have had little contact with his
English friends. He had some lengthy and occasionally irri-
tated correspondence with C. K. Ogden about the translation
of his book and, according to Ogden’s note of the beginning
of the Tractatus, read and carefully revised the proofs (?).
The English title was first intended to be Philosophical
64 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 37 -

Logic, but G. E. Moore then suggested Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus, and Wittgenstein, who liked the Spinozean
flavour, readily accepted this title. The volume appeared
in 1922, dedicated to the memory of his friend David Pinsent,
who had been killed in the war.

In the spring of 1923 Wittgenstein began writing to Keynes

and to the brilliant young mathematician F. P. Ramsay [sic] (then
just 20 years of age) who had been assisting Ogden in the
translation of the Tractatus, and, as Ogden had mentioned,
was planning to come to Vienna. Keynes at first did not reply,
but Ramsay [sic] who was then working on his review of the Tractatus,
eagerly responded and in September (when his review, which
appeared in the October issue of Mind, was already out of
his hands) came to visit Wittgenstein at Puchberg. In a let-
ter to his mother, written on September 20, 1923, Ramsay [sic]
describes this visit:
Wittgenstein is a teacher in the village school. He is
very poor, at least he lives very economically. He has
one tiny room, whitewashed, containing a bed, washstand,
small table and one hard chair and that is all there is
room for. His evening meal which I shared is rather un-
pleasant, coarse bread, butter and cacao. He looks youn-
ger than he can possible be; but he says he has bad
eyes and a cold. But his general appearance is athletic.
In explaining his philosophy he is excited and makes
vigorous gestures but relieves the tension by a charming
laugh. He has blue eyes.
He is prepared to give 4 or 5 hours a day to explaining
his book. I have had two days and got through 7 out of
80 pages. When the work is done I shall try to pump him
for ideas for its future development which I shall attempt.
He says that he himself will do nothing more not because he
is bored but because his mind is no longer flexible. He
says no one can do more than 5 or 10 years good work at
philosophy (his work took 7).
His idea of his work is not that anyone by reading it
will understand his ideas but that some day some one will
think them out again for himself and will derive great
pleasure from finding in his book their exact expression.
I think he exaggerates his own verbal inspiration, it is
much more careful than I supposed but I think it reflects
the way the ideas come to him which might not be the
same with another man.
He has already answered my chief difficulty which I have
puzzled over for a year up in despair myself and decided
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 65

- 38 -

he had not seen. I used to think Moore a great man – but

beside W.!
He says I shall forget everything he explains in a few
days; Moore in Norway said he understood W. completely
and when he got back to England was no wiser than when
he started.
It is terrible when he says ’Is that clear?’ and I say
’no’ and he says ’Damn. It’s horrible to go through all
that again.
Sometimes he says ’I can see that now we must leave it.’
He often forgot the meaning of what he wrote within 5
mts and than remembered it later. Some of his sentences
are intentionally ambiguous, having an ordinary and a
more difficult meaning which he also believes.1)458

When Ramsay [sic] returned to Cambridge he began to inquire, at

Wittgenstein’s request, about the possibilities of defraying
the costs of a visit of the latter to Cambridge, and about
the conditions of Wittgenstein’s obtaining a degree there.
He was soon able to report that there would be fifty pounds
available for the former purpose – provided, as he disclosed
in a later letter, by Keynes – and that the only degree which
Wittgenstein could obtain without great difficulty would be
Ph. D. which would require another year’s residence. In the
spring Keynes at last also replied in the most friendly and
apologetic tone to Wittgenstein’s letter of a year before and
urged him to come to England. But Wittgenstein was not hesi-
tating because he felt unfit for and was afraid of society,
and when Ramsay [sic] announced that he would again be coming to
Austria in the following summer, Wittgenstein’s visit was
postponed. Ramsay [sic] in fact came to see Wittgenstein in October
1924 at Otterthal, where Wittgenstein had then justed moved.

During the following autumn and winter Wittgenstein was working

at Otterthal on a spelling book for elementary schools which
a Viennese publisher had offered to bring out. As Wittgenstein
explains in a memorandum (submitted in the following spring
to the Ministry of education to get the book approved for use
in state schools), he had found the available dictionaries
unsuited for teaching ten- years- olds who were speaking dia-
lect, and had started dictating to them a list of about 2500
of the most common words. Out of this had grown the manuscript
of the dictionary confined to words familiar to the pupils

1) A copy of the relevant passages of this letter was kindly supplied

by Mrs. F. P. Ramsay [sic].
66 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 39 -

of elementary schools of the Austrian countryside, including

the very simplest words and so arranged as to make it easy
for a child used to dialect expressions readily to find the
correct term needed. In order to make it easy to use he had
often, especially in the case of compound words, abandoned
the purely alphabetical arrangement for psychological, gram-
matical or typographical reasons and generally avoided to
put too great a strain on the child’s capacity for abstrac-
tion. For those who know the local speech of the Austrian
country people, the sympathetic, not to say loving, under-
standing with which their simple speech is treated has a
rare charm. There is no condescension in the occasional
indication of meaning or pronounciation of words where his
experience had shown him such to be necessary. It is evident-
ly a work grown out of a practical head /need/, and the skillful
use of dialect pronounciation to explain the different
spelling of words which sound alike in polite speech (e. g.
"dass" and "das") has since been imitated. The book, or
rather pamphlet of 42 pages, containing between 6000 and
7000 words, was published in the following winter, but appears
to have had only a limited success and has now been long out
of print.1)

In Otterthal Wittgenstein also remained for a second year

(1925/26). But again there arose friction with some of the
inhabitants of the village. He was not only a skillful teacher
but genuinely fond of children; but his temper was scarcely
suitable for the task. While he was usually happy with boys,
the giggling of the girls in the mixed classes would try his
patience beyond endurance. And in his sudden anger he would
occasionally handle the boys not too gently. There were com-
plaints from parents, but before any official action was
taken, Wittgenstein, profoundly unhappy, in April 1926
resigned his post and returned to Vienna. Here he at first
seriously contemplated entering a monastery, an idea with
which he had already played before the outbreak of the war

1) Wö/r/terbuch für Volksschulen, Vienna, Höler- Pichler- Tempsky,

A.G. 1926
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 67

- 40 -

and again on his return from the prison camp. He even called
at one, taking a friend with him for moral support, but a
wise Father Superior explained to him that he would neither
find what he expected nor was led by motives which the order
could approve. For some months in the summer of 1926 he again
worked as gardener, this time with the monk- hospitallers at
Hütteldorf, a suburb of Vienna, camping all the time in the
toolshed of their garden. His return to Vienna approximately
coincides with the resumption of his philosophical work. Ram-
say’s [sic] visit and the correspondence which followed it had
rekindled the interest and now back at Vienna he made con-
tact with the new philosophical circle which had formed
there. In 1922 Moritz Schlick had become Professor of Philo-
sophy in Vienna and was gradually collecting around him the
group of logicians and scientists later become known as the
Vienna Circle. Some time late in 1924 the mathematician
Professor Kurt Reidemeister had read a paper on the Tracta-
tus which had stirred up deep interest and soon afterwards
Schlick wrote to Wittgenstein proposing to visit him. Witt-
genstein did reply but the proposed visit was apparently
postponed and when Schlick finally attempted it, he failed
to meet Wittgenstein. Mrs. Schlick, in a letter from which
I am allowed to quote, describes the profound impression
which Wittgenstein’s work had made on her husband and the
spirit in which the approach was made:
My husband went on a journey with a few chosen pupils
to Trattenbach near Kirchberg (it must, in fact, have
been Otterthal which lies between Trattenbach and Kirch-
berg) having announced previously by writing to W. the
contemplated visit but having received no answer. It was
as if he was preparing to go on holy pilgrimage, while
he explained to me, almost with awsome reverence that
W. was one of the greatest geniuses on earth. Deeply
disappointed the pilgrims returned without having ful-
filled their quest, after learning that W. was no more
in Trattenbach. Not long afterwards ... a letter came
from Mrs. Jerome Stonborough, the sister of Ludwig W.
inviting my husband for lunch in her Palace in the
Renngasse to meet her brother Ludwig. If I am not mis-
taken, the two men never met during the schoolmaster
period. Mrs. Stonborough’s invitation brought with it
68 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 41 -

a great joy and anticipation and this time M.’s expecta-

tion and hopes were not thwarted. Again I observed with
interest the reverential attitude of the pilgrim. He
returned in an ecstatic state, saying little, and I felt
I should not ask questions.459

Soon, however, another new interest arose which during the

next two years or so claimed the greater part of Wittgenstein’s
time and attention. His friend, the architect Paul Engelmann,
had been commissioned to build a house for Mrs. Stonborough.
Already on his occasional visits to Vienna in the spring of
1926 Wittgenstein had been consulted on the plans and often
succeeded to satisfy Mrs. Stonborough, who had very decided
views of her own, where Engelmann had failed. When Wittgen-
stein came to live in Vienna Engelmann proposed that they
should together direct the execution of the plan. After some
hesitation Wittgenstein accepted and to all intents and
proposes from then onwards became the directing mind. Even
though the ground plan had been decided upon before Wittgen-
stein took over, the final building, in a severe modern style
with strong emphasis on the vertical and no ornaments, was
to a large extent Wittgenstein’s work. He became fully absorbed
in the work, looked after every detail and would insist, e. g.
that to satisfy his exacting standards the radiators had to
be specially made, fitting his requirements to the fraction
of an inch. It was in this work that he gradually recovered
from the bad spiritual crisis in which he had plunged at the
end of his teaching activity.

Vienna also offered again opportunities for the exercise of

his artistic gifts. At one time he was modelling a head in
the studio of his friend Dobril [sic], showing, in spite of his
lack of technical skill, a great sense of form. But above all
it was music to which he gave his time. With his eldest sister
and his friend Koder he would practice endlessly, either ac-
companing them on the clarinet or just directing them by
whistling the tune. The works of Bruckner and of the blind
organist Labor, who had been members of the Wittgenstein
circle, were his particular favourites, and the study of a
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 69

- 42 -

clarinet quartet by Mozart occupied them for a long time.

Though his companions were the more expert practitioners,
they unquestioningly accepted him as the most musical and it
was his interpretation and his perfectionism which entirely
dominated these performances.

This is, perhaps, also the place to say something about Witt-
genstin’s literary tastes. His strongest sympathies were for
the great Russians of the last century; not only Tolstoy, whose
Chadschi Murat [sic] he had read before the first war, whose book
on the Four Gospels had had such a profound effect on him
during the war, and whose Folk Tales (in English best known
under the title Master and Man) was later one of his favourites,
but even more Dostojevski [sic], especially The Brothers Karamasov
and Crime and Punishment. These works, together with some
passing acquaintance with Russia in the later years of the
first war, produced in him a romantic love for the Russian
man which was the main cause for his recurrent projects to
go and settle in Russia. At various stages he tried to per-
suade some friends to accompany him there and at one point
was only with difficulty persuaded by Keynes from carrying
out his intention. (According to von Wright, this happened
on the expiry of Wittgenstein’s fellowship at Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1935, when Wittgenstein actually visited Russia
with a friend and apparently was pleased with what he saw.)
He certainly regarded the unfavourable reports of the press
about Russia mainly as lies; and it was only when, after
the second war, he saw the Russians in Vienna, that he be-
came disillusioned.1)

1) This came out clearly in the last conversation I had with

him some time about 1948. As the episode is rather character-
ristic, it may be told here. We had, a year or two before,
exchanged a few letters when Wittgenstein wrote to me for
advice, first on how to send food parcels to his relatives
in Vienna and then about how to get permission to visit Vie-
nna. He knew that I would face the same problems and his
questions showed the characteristic mixture of Weltfremdheit
and attention to practical detail which was so characteristic
of him. When we met we had both already been to Vienna se-
veral times and on the particular occasion I had broken the
return journey at Bale and just managed to get an upper berth
70 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 43 -

Of equal importance to him were probably three religious thin-

kers: St. Augustine, whose confessions he had read in Latin
(which he seems to have acquired during his teacher’s training),
Pascal, and S. Kierkegaard whose Philosophische Brocken he
knew and appreciated long before this author became fashio-
nable.

Like many of the more independent young Viennese of his

generation, Wittgenstein was at one time also strongly at-
tracted by the writer Karl Kraus, whose periodical Die
Fackel he regularly read. To those who have known the in-
tellectual atmosphere for which this name stands it will not
be surprising that this interest went with an appreciation
of Nestroy and G. C. Lichtenberg. In all these instances it
was Wittgenstein’s strong sense for a clear and simple lan-
guage which attracted him and this also in part accounts for
his predilection for Lessing, Mörike, Gottfried Keller,
Hebel’s Schatzkästlein and some of the short stories of
the Wilhelm Busch (particularly Eduards Traum and Der Schmetter-
ling.) It was also to a large extent their language which
made Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz and Boltsmann [sic] his favourite
scientific authors. Their works were among the few books to
which he again and again returned. Others with whose ideas

on a sleeper to continue to Calais. It was about midnight when

I boarded and, not to wake my companion, I undressed in the
dark. Suddenly a tuzzled head shot out from the lower berth
and asked whether I was not Professor Hayek. On my assenting
and before I had quite comprehend that it was Wittgenstein, he
turned without a further word to the wall. Next morning he
rose before me and when I returned from breakfast I found him
deeply absorbed in a detective story. I assumed that he wanted
to avoid conversation and for some two hours we both silently
read until he suddenly put down his book and engaged me in
the most amiable conversation – mainly about the state of
Austria and the Continent in general and about what he had
seen of the Russians in particular. It just began to get in-
teresting when we arrived at Calais. In parting he said that
we must continue the conversation on the boat, but though I
looked for him he was not to be found and I did in fact not
see him again.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 71

- 44 -

he was very familiar though he disliked their manner were

Ernst Mach and the psychologist Otto Weininger.

Though in one sense his standards were very austere and made
him dislike anything which he felt was not perfectly genuine
or in any way artificial, he could give himself unrestrained-
ly to the representation of more primitive emotions and not
only liked to read detective and adventure stories but could
thoroughly enjoy even the more crude type of "Western" film.

But to return to the years 1926 - 1929 which Wittgenstein

spent at Vienna. It seems that during the spring of 1927 he
was prevailed upon to attend several of the Monday evening
meetings of the Schlick circle; at least in the autumn of
that year Schlick was writing to him that he hoped Wittgen-
stein would again come to these meetings as he must have
seen what a great pleasure the discussion with him had regu-
larly been to them. But apparently he never attended again
and most of the members of the group learnt of his work
only indirectly, through Schlick himself and later on parti-
cularly through Dr. Friedrich Waismann. These two men met
Wittgenstein frequently and he often dictated to them his
ideas so that they became for a time the only channel through
which he reached wider circles. They, in turn, came to
regard themselves as little more than the expositors of
Wittgenstein’s ideas, and to many of Schlick’s friends in
particular it became a matter of surprise that this fertile
and mature mind should come to be so completely dominated
by Wittgenstein that he would often hesitate to pronounce
a philosophical question until he had heard Wittgenstein’s
latest views on the subject. And of Dr. Waismann it was
generally believed at that time in Vienna that he did not
dare to publish a finished book (which in fact never appeared)
which was on part based on Wittgenstein’s ideas, until Witt-
genstein himself had published them.

In 1929 at last arrangements were made, probably with the

help of Keynes, for Wittgenstein to go to Cambridge to get
his Ph. D. He was formally registered as a research student
72 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

- 45 -

for the year 1929 - 1930, with Ramsay [sic] as his supervisor, the
Tractatus as his thesis, and G. E. Moore as examiner. The
close personal contact with Ramsay [sic] which then started was
however cut short by Ramsay’s [sic] death in January 1930.

(At this point I broke off six years ago when Wittgenstein’s
executors refused me permission to quote from Wittgenstein’s
letters until they had themselves published them. They have
still not done so, but I am not now likely to return to a
task which I undertook largely to collect the available
information while Wittgenstein’s friend were still alive.
Some of them have since died and I can no longer submit to
their approval what I have written. Beyond this point I have
only disconnected notes which could be of little use to any-
body else. Moreover the greater part of the remaining years
of Wittgenstein’s life are now fully covered by the recently
published Memoir by Norman Malcolm.)

Chicago, November 1959

 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 73

Notes
1 William Eccles and Wolfe Mays have published their recollections of Wittgenstein, though
in a revised version, in: Mays, W., 1961. "Wittgenstein’s Manchester Period ", Manchester
Guardian March 24.
Mays, W. 1979. "Wittgenstein in Manchester" In: Haller, R., Grassl, W. (eds.) Langauge, Logic
and Philosophy. Proceedings of the 4th International Wittgenstein Symposium, pp. 171–178. CF.
Monk, R., 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage, pp. 29 –35.
2 Russell, B., 1951. "Obituary: Ludwig Wittgenstein". Mind 60, pp. 297 –298.
3 Ibid.
4 Pinsent, D., 1990. A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man: From the Diary of David Hume
Pinsent 1912 –1914. Edited by G. H. v. Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. This edition was used for
proofreading the quotes from Pinsent’s diary in Hayek’s sketch.
5 reading:
6 naïve
7 philosophers,
8 in ignorance,
9 stupid and dishonest and
10 mistakes!
11 lots
12 himself:
13 terrific
14 commentary in brackets not in original letter
15 loneliness: that
16 then,
17 himself:
18 de trop
19 world’,
20 philosophy and come
21 sentence missing
22 him: and has been
23 philosophy:
24 Mr
25 very
26 :
27 don’t
28 it.)
29 not underlined in the original
30 works
31 Phil.
32 3
33 -
34 of
35 7th
36 !
37 ,
38 Dear Russell, There are yet
39 no comma in the original
40 geting
41 relations
74 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

42 &
43 &
44 thinks that
45 Mrs
46 wilde
47 I now
48 James’s "Varieties of religious exp.".
49 in which
50 would like
51 of the
52 2nd
53 not underlined in the original
54 &
55 double-underlined
56 &
57 apparent variables, it’s
58 no logical
59 be of
60 totaly
61 !
62 Do
63 ’No – Beastly’ to 90 per cent of what he shewed us!
64 ’Philistine’
65 ’Philistines’ -
66 dislikes. I think some of the views
67 philistine,
68 commentary from von Hayek
69 as soon as
70 older!
71 commentary from von Hayek
72 solution too.
73 Von Hayek’s footnote later on this page most likely refers also to this passage, since he uses
the plural "are" in that footnote. Letter from Moore to Hayek without date published and
edited in: Nedo, M., 2011. Wittgenstein and Cambridge Family Resemblances – A presentation
by Michael Nedo. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/4670400/Wittgenstein_and_Cam-
bridge_Family_Resemblances_A_presentation_by_Michael_Nedo (accessed 29 April 2019).
74 One Farmer (the man I met chez Ponsonby at tea the other day.)
75 a man Wittgenstein dislikes
76 dishonest minded:
77 Farmer
78 any one – :
79 Farmer
80 Farmer
81 obviously
82 affraid
83 &
84 allthough
85 Theory
86 generall
87 &
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 75

88 &
89 & all about you!
90 letter in GBW is dated: between 10.-20. 01. 1913
91 cannot yet tell when
92 Cambridge, as
93 fathers
94 yet
95 pain
96 here. So
97 wheter
98 the
99 weeks
100 &
101 – I have
102 views
103 Love
104 .
105 prop, say,
106 &
107 "Something is human"
108 this, is
109 think that
110 Types
111 symbolisme
112 prop. Socrates
113 Socrates Mortality &
114 whant
115 "Mortality
116 "Mortality"
117 At this point a sentence is missing in the transcript: But if I analyse (as I do now) into Socrates
& (∃ x) x is Mortal or generally into x & (∃ x ) φ ( x )* it becomes impossible to substitute the
wrong way round, because the two symbols are now of a different kind themselves.
118 most
119 theorys
120 symbolisme
121 showing that
122 seem
123 symbolised
124 substituted in one another’s places.
125 !
126 views
127 allthough
128 sense data
129 very glad that
130 myne
131 letter dated in GBW: 21th January 1913
132 beautifull
133 death that
134 pains
135 the
76 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

136 joifull &

137 appeared
138 lectures
139 commentary Hayek
140 Logic:
141 sentences
142 English.
143 Dr
144 effort?
145 not yet clear
146 Witt.
147 sounds a wild scheme!
148 Witt.
149 1 ½ hour
150 Witt.
151 under anaesthetic
152 ’Auto-suggestion’
153 Wittgenstein once found himself
154 drowsy etc,
155 &
156 hopefull
157 &
158 sanguin at present; but allthough I have not solved one
159 before.
160 missing footnote from original text
161 thereby – as
162 really
163 crystallising
164 Philosophy
165 man
166 rest of sentence missing: anything – Metaphysics etc are hampered by total lack of data. It is
like the transition from Alchemy to Chemistry.
167 lqPrincipia’
168 hotel – somewhere
169 Fjord, amongst
170 country – and
171 Tourists
172 Ludwig is very firm).
173 Fjord
174 really in an
175 evening he blamed
176 I only hope that an out of doors life here
177 bad – (in that nervous sensibility) -
178 siting
179 beautifull fiord &
180 &
181 &
182 untill
183 of a
184 Bipolarity-business
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 77

185 which still

186 me to be
187 .
188 &
189 fiord
190 &
191 &
192 ??!
193 awfull
194 &
195 loosing
196 &
197 some very serious
198 ’Theory of Types’
199 him all today.
200 part of sentence missing: before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and
201 die -
202 thought etc – which of course are
203 he is certain he will
204 years -
205 fundamentalNow
206 shall
207 dy
208 beeing
209 &
210 &
211 therefor
212 done
213 if
214 as to
215 myne
216 dear
217 Point
218 But my point is this:
219 &
220 &
221 in your presence
222 1st of Oct. &
223 Oct 3rd
224 &
225 –I
226 &
227 allways
be yours L.W.
228 wit. that
229 me – but
230 circumstances,
231 distractions
232 contempt etc,
233 mind – but
78 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

234 probability
235 For editions of Wittgenstein’s "Notes on Logic" see: Wittgenstein, L., 1957. "Notes on Logic".
The Journal of Philosophy 54, pp. 230 - 245; Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Notebooks 1914 - 1916. Edited
by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; and more recently in:
Potter, M. 2008. Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic. Oxford: Oxford Universoty Press.
236 untill quite recently
237 &
238 ; very
239 together
240 questions, especially with the questions
241 occurence
242 same
243 of a function.
244 However I don’t loose courage & go on thinking.
245 Postmasters
246 &
247 &
248 &
249 Soc.
250 affraid
251 can’t yet tel
252 whant
253 shall know it
254 sentence missing (If you kindly send the bill with them I will send the money immediately
after receiving the Pamflets – )
255 meet
256 learned
257 "Sie" or "Du" &
258 english
259 !-
260 vielen
261 wiederholen:
262 Andere logische Sätze giebt es nicht.
263 .)
264 "(∃x) . x = x" z. B.
265 Physik
266 "(x): x = x . ⊃ . (∃y). y = y"
267 Physik
268 ob es ein Ding giebt
269 inf. ax.;
270 ob es ℵ0
271 Reductions
272 Some sentences missing.
273 Ich bitte Dich
274 schrecklich
275 widerholen
276 allergrößten Widerstreben
277 -
278 – noch gar nicht klar.
279 Ax. of Red.
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 79

280 müßen
281 Some sentences missing
282 wol
283 daß
284 !
285 große
286 muß
287 auf eine und dieselbe Weise
288 – Ich
289 mußt
290 Tagebuchs
291 den
292 läßt
293 Grundfrage
294 -
295 &
296 Gott,
297 &
298 klar;
299 müßte
300 !-
301 zu dem
302 ist
303 ist er nicht unglaublich? -
304 große
305 &
306 ist;
307 glaube,
308 1½
309 gewußt.
310 Leider
311 keine
312 ist
313 Wochen
314 )
315 &
316 gequählt
317 Aussetzen
318 daß
319 ein Arbeiten
320 Quahl
321 unsagbar
322 Stimme der Vernunft durch den Lärm der Gespenster
323 vielleicht
324 &
325 nie gewusst,
326 heißt,
327 einen
328 Wahnsinn zu fühlen
329 !-
80 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

330 großer
331 besten
332 genießen
333 genießest.
334 genoßen haßt,
335 versuch’
336 Law
337 einfach, daß
338 scheint
339 Ereignisse
340 daß
341 &
342 Behauptung)
343 anfängt
344 bewegen;
345 Du -
346 sehen – daß keine
347 läßt, außer eben in dem Fall daß
348 Dir, daß
349 gienge. Verzeih mir daher diesen langen Brief
350 daß
351 muß,
352 in der letzten Woche
353 Schluß gekommen, daß wir eigentlich nicht zu einander
354 Dies meine ich nicht als Tadel!
355 schon so oft
356 inständigst
357 halten;
358 Schluß ziehen werde. -
359 bloß
360 Folge Deiner Empfindlichkeit
361 daß
362 mußte,
363 z. B.
364 Wissenschaftlichen
365 müßen,
366 daß
367 ein
368 daß
369 daß
370 katechisieren;
371 daß
372 Ich werde Dir so lange von ganzen Herzen dankbar und zugetan sein,
373 freundlich
374 wol!
375 Immer
376 so voll
377 & Freundschaft, daß
378 muß
379 Vorhaben
 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein 81

380 muß,
381 Hoffnung daß
382 muß ich nocheinmal
383 nur
384 äußerlichen Gründen, (Nervosität, Übermüdung u. dgl.)
385 – jedenfalls in mir – sehr tief begründet Du
386 daß
387 &
388 kamen,
389 heucheln,
390 läßt sich nicht leugnen
391 voll von den häßlichsten & kleinlichsten Gedanken & Taten.
392 dann dürfen die Schwächen der beiden nicht
393 rein
394 nur,
395 objectiv
396 &
397 Freundschaftlichen
398 zu
399 -
400 machen
401 – worüber immer –,
402 mir!)
403 großer
404 hat und
405 glaube, es
406 -
407 nur dann
408 &
409 L. W.
410 Letter from Moore to Hayek without date partly published and edited in: Nedo, M., 2011.
Wittgenstein and Cambridge Family Resemblances – A presentation by Michael Nedo. Avail-
able at: https://www.academia.edu/4670400/Wittgenstein_and_Cambridge_Family_Resem-
blances_A_presentation_by_Michael_Nedo (accessed 29 April 2019). Concerning editions of
Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic see endnote ccxlii.
411 daß
412 l.
413 daß
414 große
415 & kann weder arbeiten,
416 ausführlich
417 &
418 Neues -
419 liesest.
420 wol
421 missing: Bis dahin – Dein L. W.
422 P.S.
423 letter is originally from 13th March 1919
424 6
425 believe I’ve solved
82 Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein

426 cann’t
427 &
428 Prigionere.
429 &
430 cours means that nobody will understand it; allthough
431 believe,
432 sentence missing
433 affraid this won’t
434 "before long".
435 time yet till
436 &
437 letter is originally from 12th June 1919
438 daß
439 6 Jahren in Norwegen
440 sentence missing
441 M.S. könne
442 Komentar
443 Buch
444 im Stande.
445 bitte, tue es. -
446 M.S.
447 gelesen hast auf sicherem Wege nach
448 jetzt
449 darauf es
450 müßen und zu sehen, wie
451 draußen
452 denken daß
453 wird! -
454 &
455 and explain
456 very
457 sole!
458 A place of publication could not be identified.
459 A place of publication could not be identified.
Allan Janik

Family Relationships and Family Resemblances:

Hayek and Wittgenstein
An Afterword

Dr. Erbacher is certainly right in identifying the source of Hayek’s interest in writing
a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein as a combination of fascination with a larger-
than-life, indeed, legendary figure, who accompanied him, as it were, throughout
his career from his student days in Vienna to England and beyond, as well as the
fact that he just happened to be distantly related to him.
The family relationship involved here is in itself of more than casual interest.
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich von Hayek were both born into Vienna’s »Sec-
ond Society,« as the grande bourgeoisie is sometimes designated, whose ascendency
was linked to the industrialization of the Habsburg Monarchy in the second half of
the nineteenth century. The Second Society was a relatively small, highly cohesive,
elite of some two hundred interrelated families, many of whom (including the
Wittgensteins, but not the Hayeks) had a secularized Jewish background. In fact,
Vienna’s Second Society bears comparison with what the English refer to as »The
Cousinhood« of industrious Jewish merchants such as the Montefiores, the Sas-
soons and the Wolfsons, who migrated there from the Continent in the 18th century
to share in England’s economic growth and enjoy the social freedom it offered. The
Second Society was not exclusively Jewish but it was, nevertheless, imbued with the
spirit of Jewish enlightenment. It formed an elite, which was in its way even more
closed than the aristocracy itself was (something that was not entirely unproblem-
atic, since the Second Society also claimed to be the bearer of liberalism, which itself
implies a certain commitment to an egalitarianism that was foreign to Vienna’s
Second Society). Wealth and education (Besitz und Bildung) were the criteria for
admission. If wealth was the route of entry for the entrepreneurial Wittgensteins,
education was the avenue of access for the academic Hayeks; for Hayek, unlike
Wittgenstein, followed in the footsteps of his grandfathers as scientists.
In any case, at the time that Ludwig died in 1951, the 52 year-old Hayek would
have, for three decades, been surrounded by eminent scholars: social scientists and
philosophers, who simply stood in awe of his cousin. From his education in law and
political science in Vienna in the years immediately following World War I through
his years in England between 1931 and 1945 he could scarcely avoid finding himself
under the penumbra of Wittgenstein’s reputation. One prevailing view of Wittgen-
stein then was that of the Eccentric Genius, which none less than Bertrand Russell
had propagated from their first encounter in 1911. That view was strongly reinforced
84 Allan Janik

by Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic, withdrawn lifestyle, as well as the obscurities of his

unorthodox mode of philosophizing. On that first meeting, Russell found himself
totally stymied by being absolutely incapable of convincing Wittgenstein that there
was no hippopotamus (in some versions of the story rhinoceros) in the room on
the basis of the »fact« that you could not see one there. Wittgenstein’s tendency to
deny flatly things that Russell took for granted led the latter to think that the young
man did not believe in anything at all. Immensely impressed by Wittgenstein’s
boldness, he set an image of Wittgenstein in the philosophical community that
persisted in some quarters for some fifty years. Wittgenstein was considered to be a
kind of philosophical idiot savant, with enormously profound insights into logic and
meaning, inaccessible to »normal« thinkers, that he was not capable of articulating
in terms of arguments and theories as philosophers have traditionally done. Instead,
Wittgenstein was more or less »condemned« to employing a sibylline, telegraphic
mode of expressing his insights. Indeed, this attitude was so reverently cultivated
among Wittgenstein freaks then that some of them actually went so far as to
memorize the Tractatus in the hope that the insights that it contained would as it
were »rub off« on them intellectually. Both his form of expression in that book and
the powerful critique of its central theses that Wittgenstein dramatically developed
from 1929 onwards, were totally unorthodox stylistically as well as philosophically
iconoclastic and, as such tended to confirm Russell’s view of him.
It was only as Wittgenstein’s papers – themselves objects of considerable spec-
ulation: did they contain evidence of sources that he concealed from the public?
were there references to his (alleged) homosexuality? – became accessible to the
scholarly community at large beginning in the 1970s that this picture began to
diffuse as it was replaced with another, more objectively grounded one, on the basis
of texts and letters edited from those papers. Little wonder that a brilliant younger
cousin, whose own interests moved from technical analyses of strictly economic
issues involving the theory of money and business cycles (for which he would be
granted the first Nobel Prize in Economics), would come to extend to philosophical
efforts to fathom how human thriving could be understood on the basis of an
elaborate linkage between economics and politics, would be puzzled enough by
Wittgenstein as to want to understand how he got to be the peculiar person and
unorthodox philosopher that he was. Beyond doubt, there was good reason for
Hayek to set his efforts on explaining how Wittgenstein got to be Wittgenstein.
Doubtless his knowledge of Ludwig’s extraordinary family background, growing
up as the son of a man who held a monopoly on steel production in the Habsburg
Monarchy, began with what he had learned from his mother, who had come to know
Ludwig as she played with his sisters as a child. So even if Hayek did not have much
first-hand knowledge of his subject’s origins, he did have inside information with
which he could orient himself. He had to have been deeply disappointed when the
family refused to co-operate with him. That deserves a bit of commentary.
If Wittgenstein’s philosophical heirs had their doubts about the capacity of a
 Family Relationships and Family Resemblances: Hayek and Wittgenstein 85

would-be biographer to fathom Wittgenstein’s intellectual world and his mode of

philosophizing, his immediate family was even more concerned about the ability of
anyone who had not known him very well to capture the psychological nuances of
his particular way of being »wittgensteinish,« i.e. to pursue the most difficult solu-
tions to his problems, doggedly subjecting himself to the most rigorous standards
of self-criticism, come what may, as he did. So Gretl Stonborough asked herself
whether Ludwig would have approved of Hayek’s (or anybody else’s) biography of
him (with examples such as the early essay of Maurice Cranston rightly and José
Ferrater Mora less so before her) and, unsurprisingly, came up with the answer
»no!« She, like her brother, and indeed, his whole generation, was not of the
opinion that the public had a right to carte blanche access to all the details of a
famous person’s life: there was such a thing as privacy, after all. Little wonder that
contemporaries of his, as different as T. S. Eliot and Ludwig von Ficker, objected to
the idea that there ever be a biography written about them. It was a normal attitude
in that generation and nothing surprising at all. If anything, such sentiments were
even more strongly expressed by Miss Anscombe and Rush Rhees among Wittgen-
stein’s literary executors. Dr. Erbacher rightly points to a huge tension between the
demands of scholarship and those of discretion involved here clash irreconcilably.
In our time such notions as personal fidelity in dealing with dead celebrities seems
quaint. In one sense the story of the premature end of Hayek’s efforts is a reminder
of a sense of discretion that we have lost. Nevertheless, we should not forget that
there are legitimate scholarly interests in eccentric creative personalities that can
and ought to be pursued in aid of understanding the factors that determine the
intellectual development of the extraordinarily gifted. We should not forget that
B. F. McGuinness took nearly as long to write Mrs. Stonborough’s kind of biography:
Ludwig’s life as he might have seen it, or at least the first half of it, as it took Ludwig
to live it.
We shall do well to conclude these pensées by a consideration of what Wittgen-
stein and Hayek shared in common as thinkers. Despite the many important
differences between Hayek and Wittgenstein bearing upon the role that politics,
scholarship and academia played in their lives there is one aspect of their respec-
tive mentalities that they most definitely have in common. It is a sense of that
the standard academic ways of posing questions within disciplines are absolutely
inadequate to answer them. Each of them, in his own way followed the problems
he confronted wherever they led him, without regard for conventional academic
boundaries. Hayek, for example, he needed to go beyond the frontiers of economics
into politics, the history of ideas and, ultimately, philosophy, if he was going to
illuminate the issues that most concerned him about economic life. He is justly
described as a polymath. One simply need look at the footnotes to The Constutution
of Liberty, the definitive statement of classical liberal values (in the European, not
the American sense) to get a sense of the breadth as well as the depth of his learning.
That sort of scholarship, »science« (Wissenschaft), was foreign to Wittgenstein. The
86 Allan Janik

basis of his thinking was conceptual and imaginative rather than documentary
and discursive, in a word, »literary«, rather than theoretical. Hayek was subver-
sive in an interdisciplinary way; whereas the subversive moment in Wittgenstein’s
philosophizing was, for want of a better word »therapeutic« (although we must
insist that these words are employed with great caution here). As Wittgenstein’s
cleverly selected striking alternative examples to the standard philosophical ones
are presented in his works this has all had a way of looking like anthropology,
child psychology or even fiction at certain moments but the aim is first, last and
always emancipator and philosophical. He wants to show us that the search for
theory in philosophy is completely counter-productive. In fact theories in philos-
ophy are more aspects of the problematic nature of the discipline than solutions
to difficulties to paraphrase Karl Kraus (somewhat awkwardly). The point is that
both Hayek and Wittgenstein were courageous enough to accept the challenge of
re-thinking the intellectual enterprises that are philosophy and economics from
the bottom up. So there is justification for claiming that, just as well as there is a
family relationship between Wittgenstein and Hayek, there is a family resemblance
between them as bold thinkers whose pursuit of problems was so relentless as to
lead them far beyond the confines of conventional academic inquiry. That is clear
with respect to Wittgenstein but less obviously so with respect to Hayek; yet it
is there. Those who only know Hayek in connection with neo-liberal, supply-side
economics will be flabbergasted to find him making positively utopian proposals
with respect to, say, voting. Thus, in order to eliminate demagoguery in politics,
Hayek proposes that we only be allowed to vote once in our lives at the age of
forty and the candidates, themselves exclusively made up of forty year-olds, who
are selected in those elections should serve for fif teen years and then retire to
be elder statesmen. This is all in aid of eliminating the basic source of evil and
inefficiency in politics: the politicians desire to be re-elected. Thus, what seems
to be a bizarre suggestion is, in fact, a response to one of the most problematic
aspects of today’s party politics. It forces us to rethink our everyday assumptions
in every bit as must a way as Wittgenstein when he asks us to consider why we
believe so unshakably that roses have no teeth. Couldn’t we consider the teeth of
the cows that eat grass and produce the dung for fertilizing the rose to be the rose’s
metaphorical teeth? Nothing bearing upon solid conventional usage speaks against
it. There is such a thing as metaphorical usage, after all. However conservative
Wittgenstein and Hayek may have been, there is something refreshingly radical in
the way each of them makes demands on us, his readers. This shared deep-seated
intellectual radicalism had to be a factor in stimulating the fascination that drew
Hayek to Wittgenstein. It is a pity that Hayek never got a chance to find out what
made Wittgenstein tick. On the other hand, the history of the last sixty five years
of Wittgenstein scholarship indicate that writing Wittgenstein’s biography was a
far more complex task than anything that Hayek, for all his brilliance, might have
imagined.
Index

Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth M. 14 –16, 18, Hitler, Adolf 9

20, 22, 24, 26, 78, 85 Hume, David 25
Bamber, J. 32, 34 Iaco, Moira de 11, 25
Bartley, William 23 –24 Immler, Nicole L. 25
Baum, Wilhelm 23 –24 Iven, Mathias 11, 17, 25
Beethoven, Ludwig van 34, 45 James, William 38, 74
Berger, Christian 25 Janik, Allan 26 –27, 83 –86
Berger, Georg 23 Jackson, A. Camo 18, 24
Boltzmann, Ludwig 70 Johnson, William Ernest 40 –41
Brahms, Johannes 9, 29, 34, Kant, Immanuel 57
Broad, Charlie Dunbar 21, 24 Keller, Gottfried 70
Brouwer, Luitzen 11 Keynes, John Maynard 11 –12, 14, 19 –20,
Bruckner, Anton 68 23 –25, 40 –41, 43, 58, 64 –65, 69, 71
Busch, Wilhelm 70 Kierkegaard, Sören 70
Carnap, Rudolf 25 Kipling, Rudyard 39
Chiodi, Guglielmo 25 Klein, Peter G. 25
Citron, Gabriel 26 –27 Koder, Rudolf 14, 22, 63, 68
Coda, Anna 26 –27 Kraus, Karl 54, 70, 86
Cook, Messrs. 33 Labor, Josef 9, 68
Cranston, Maurice 14 –16, 24, 85 Lachmann, Ludwig M. 11, 25
Ditta, Leonardo 25 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 70
Doblhog 33 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 18, 26, 70
Drobil, Michael 14, 57, 68 Littlewood, John Edensor 40
Dorward, A. J. 40 Lobis, Ulrich 26 –27
Dostoevsky, Fjodor Michailowitsch 69 Loos, Adolf 55 –56
Eccles, William 23, 31 –35, 73 Mach, Ernst 42, 71
Edmonds, David 12, 24 Malcom, Norman 24, 72
Eidinow, John 12, 24 Mason, C. M. 32, 34
Eliot, Thomas Stearns 85 Maxwell, James Clerk 70
Engelmann, Paul 23, 56, 68 Mayr, Kerstin 26 –27
Farmer 41, 74 Mays, Wolfe 23, 31 –35, 73
Ferrater Mora, José 14, 16, 24, 85 McGuinness, Bernard Francis (Brian) 10 –11,
Feyerabend, Paul 12, 24 22 –23, 25 –27, 85
Ficker, Ludwig von 54 –55, 85 Mill, John Stuart 13
Frege, Gottlob 36, 38, 40 –41, 59 Mises, Ludwig von 10
Gasking, Douglas A. T. 18, 24 Mises, Richard von 10
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 19, 38, 51 Monk, Ray 11, 23, 25, 73
Grassl, Wolfgang 25, 73 Moore, Georg Edward 13, 20, 36, 38, 40, 43,
Haller, Rudolf 73 48 –49, 53, 54, 58, 64 –65, 72, 74, 81
Halder, Barbara 26 –27 Mörike, Eduard 51, 70
Hänsel, Ludwig 13 –14, 16 –19, 22 –23, 25, 57 Morra, Lucia 12, 25
Hardy, Godfrey Harold 40 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 25, 69
Harrod, Henry Roy Forbes 41 Myers, Charles Samuel 38
Heinrich, Richard 24 Myers, Edith Babette 38
Hertz, Heinrich 70 Nedo, Michael 74, 81
88 Index

Nemeth, Elisabeth 24 Schubert, Franz 45

Nestroy, Johann 70 Schuster, Franz Arthur Friedrich 32
Nyberg, Tauno 26 Seekircher, Monika 26 –27
Ogden, Charles Kay 63 –64 Shwayder, D.S. 48
Ostwald, Wilhelm 60 Smith, Barry 25
Paderewski, Ignacy Jan 34 Socrates 42, 75
Pascal, Blaise 70 Somavilla, Ilse 14, 25
Pichler, Wolfram 24 Spinoza, Baruch de 64
Pinsent, David 10, 13, 20, 23, 25, 36 –37, 39, 41, Sraffa, Piero 11 –12, 14, 25
43 –46, 48, 54 –55, 64, 73 Stadler, Friedrich 10 –11, 25
Popper, Karl 11 –12 Stonborough, Margaret 11, 14, 17 –19, 21 –22,
Potter, Michael 78 25, 67 –68, 85
Putre, Josef 23, 62 Stonborough, Pierre 19
Ramsey, Frank Plumpton 11, 13 –14, 19, 20, 23, Stonborough, Thomas 17, 22
25, 64 –65, 67, 72 Tolstoy, Lew Nikolajewitsch 56 –57, 61, 69
Ramsey, Lettice 65 Trakl, Georg 55
Reidemeister, Kurt 67 Unterkircher, Anton 25
Rhees, Rush 14, 18, 20, 26, 85 Wagner, Richard 34
Rilke, Rainer Maria 55 Waismann, Friedrich 11, 25, 71
Robbins, Lionel 11 Wang, Joseph 26 –27
Rogers, Dr. 43 –44 Ward, James 40
Rosner, N. 23 Weininger, Otto 71
Russell, Bertrand 10, 13, 17, 20, 22, 36 –38, Whitehead, Alfred North 45
40 –49, 53 –61, 73, 83 –84 Wieser, Friedrich von 10
Saint Augustine 61, 70 Wittgenstein, Hermine 12, 68
Scherleitner, M. 23 Wittgenstein, Karl 28 –30, 37, 41 –42, 54
Schlick, Blanche Guy 67 Wittgenstein, Paul 30
Schlick, Moritz 11, 13 –14, 23, 25, 67, 71 Wright, Georg Henrik von 13 –23, 25 –27, 54,
Schorner, Michael 26 –27 69, 73, 78