Anthony Gottlieb

There is a small industry of Wittgenstein biographies, still led by Ray Monk’s The Duty of Genius. But there’s room for more, and I found Gottleib’s book interesting for several reasons.

One is his account of Wittgenstein’s family history. We knew of the family wealth but not as much about his father, Karl’s attachment to an “American” way of thinking about business and achievement. Karl wanted badly to pass along an industrious and entrepreneurial temperament to his sons. He show more particularly wanted to see his sons follow him into industry, manufacturing, and engineering. The “airplanes” in the book’s subtitle references Wittgenstein’s own interests in aeronautics (he received a patent for a unique propeller design). The fates and achievements of Karl’s sons and daughters tell a story of pressure, with tragedy and greatness spilling all around.

Gottlieb goes farther back as well to find Wittgenstein’s roots in Jewish European culture, with its headwinds and tailwinds. The book is itself part of a series of books on “Jewish Lives.”

Wittgenstein’s aristocratic background isn’t just a matter of financial power. The family was a social and cultural power, with artists and composers frequently visiting and providing influence at the “Palais Wittgenstein.”

An aristocratic personality isn’t necessarily a good thing for anybody. We knew of Wittgenstein’s own troubled and troubling personality. By many accounts he was just a hard person to be around. On his return to Cambridge after his long absence in Norway and Austria, John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife, Lydia, “Pray for me.” What’s remarkable about this from Keynes is that it’s coming from a man we’d imagine to have an impregnable sense of confidence and self-worth, not easily harmed by the worst of difficult personalities. But Wittgenstein was on the very high end of the spectrum of difficult personalities, frequently referring to those around him as “muck” or “vile” or just plain “stupid.” It seems, by Gottlieb’s account to have been a family trait, or a family curse.

Wittgenstein’s relationships at Cambridge were always volatile. He so offended G.E. Moore that the two of them didn’t speak for fifteen years, despite at other times having a close intellectual relationship. He broke off his friendship with Bertrand Russell, although maintaining a purely intellectual relationship. Outbursts of disdain and disrespect were just part of the deal in relationships, although those over-developed facets of Wittgenstein’s persanality may have been exaggerated, by Gottlieb’s account, in his relationships with other intellectuals, while he could be downright playful in other circumstances.

Wittgenstein’s dismissive disdain for many around him was also directed back on himself. I suppose if you’re going to be insulting, you may as well include yourself for the sake of consistency. Gottlieb writes, “His charismatic gift was to be halting, self-deprecating, and imperious all at the same time.” Deprecating others can be superior but it doesn’t have to be.

Wittgenstein was also prone to developing “love” relationships, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes not. For the most part, these were with younger men within his intellectual circle, and some were long-lasting, as with David Pinset and with Ben Richards. Gottlieb also gives some accounting of Wittgenstein’s relationship with Marguerite Respinger (see Wittgenstein’s diaries from the period of that relationship, published as Movements of Thought, for Wittgensteisn’s own reflections).

Gottlieb’s book is not a philosophical critique of Wittgenstein’s work, but he does offer some provocative insights into Wittgenstein’s intellectual and philosophical development. It’s more intellectual biography than philosophy or pure biography, and his thoughts on that level are, I think, the strength of the book.

In particular, Gottlieb calls attention to a change in Wittgenstein’s philosophical perspective and temperament after his time teaching schoolchildren in Austria. The Tractatus, written before that time, is declarative and definite. Wittgenstein even regarded himself as having solved the major problems of philosophy with that one short, somewhat enigmatic book.

His writing after that (see the Philosophical Investigations) is questioning and experimental, even a bit humble on a philosophical level. And, perhaps owing to his experiences with the schoolchildren, as Gottlieb emphasizes, Wittgenstein now puts at the center of his thoughts about language and mathematics questions about how something, e.g., the meaning of a word, is learned (see, for example, the opening discussion of Augustine and how a language might be learned in the Investigations). His practice of examining language through “primitive language games” may also reflect a new regard for the simpler levels at which schoolchildren begin and at which they grow adept, as opposed to the more convoluted language games of philosophers.

One of the points that Gottlieb makes about the whole of Wittgenstein’s work is his quest, maybe obsession, with clarity. The Tractatus, even though enigmatic, strives for a simple clarity about the relationship between language and reality and about the limits of language. His later work, in the Investigations and also in the posthumously published notebooks, read from this perspective like an heroic attempt to clear the overgrowth and underbrush around language as a natural and primarily pragmatic activity, without pretension or complexity.

All biographies of Wittgenstein tend to have this quality of throwing new and different light on why he practiced philosophy in the way that he did, and how this philosophical activity bears a relationship with his own somewhat tortured inner life. This was a man who constantly thought about and examined himself, maybe trying to clear that same overgrowth and underbrush from his own character. show less

"The Dream of Enlightenment" discusses the key figures in the second great flowering of Western philosophy, in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. It follows Gottlieb's earlier work, "The Dream of Reason", which covered the first flowering in ancient Greece. A third volume which will bring the series up to the present. "Enlightenment" is a worthy successor to "Reason", which is high praise indeed. Both books have a lot to teach the reader, and both do so in an eminently readable show more manner. Gottlieb's prose is crystal clear and frequently witty. The structure of the book -- in which key philosophers, starting with Descartes and ending with Voltaire, are discussed in the context of their times -- carries the narrative along. That presentation in historical context is amplified by brief biographical sketches and by some discussion of what contemporaries had to say about the personality of the philosopher in question. That was particularly valuable to me, because it gave the ideas under discussion a depth that they would lack in a contextless listing. A very valuable book: I look forward to Volume 3. show less

The Dream of Reason takes a human, popular view at philosophy from the ancient Greeks forward to the Renaissance, treating this conversation as one of wise, fallible, and occasionally funny humans through the ages. These were people grappling with Big Questions, namely what is the universe made of, how did it come to be, and how do people lead meaningful lives, and while their answers do not match modern understandings, they are foundational. For someone with a fairly weak background in show more philosophy, especially the older stuff, it's a good supplement to a missed classical education.

The first few chapters, on the pre-Socratics, are necessarily weaker, given that the surviving works of these authors is measured in a few hundred lines, and sometimes even a handful of direct words and a maze of quotations and commentaries. The book fully arrives with Socrates, who's method of systematic questioning set the form for much of what follows. Plato and Aristotle get detailed overviews as well, with their foundational works on ethics, metaphysics, as well as more practical topics like logic and biology.

What follows after the big three is less good. Gottlieb has less sympathy for the efforts of the stoics, epicureans, and skeptics to flesh out frameworks in the wake of Aristotle. Medieval theology, and the effort to synthesize non-heretical Christian theology with neoplatonist mysticism is mostly a dead end. One thing which I learned was that the scientific reaction against Aristotle was more rhetoric than reality. Aristotle couldn't have been the stifling authority on Western learning during the Middle Ages, because he was almost lost entirely, only being preserved by Arab philosophers (a sadly absent chapter). The abstruse commentary style of the scholastics has little in common with Aristotle, who can be tedious, but is generally a model of clarity. While Aristotle's physics lack the tools of quantified measurement which make modern physics work, he was a dedicated empiricist.

Fun and informative, and not exactly unbiased, The Dream of Reason is a solid introduction and overview. show less

Ours may not be the best of all possible worlds; but these pioneers helped to make it an intellectually adventurous and, as d'Alembert suggested, a less ignorant one.

Dream was a most welcome birthday present for me personally its publication is also timely given a world which sorely needs to examine its present trajectory. It is a survey by a retired journalist, a layman more than apt to do the heavy lifting about the advocates of a mechanized world, the stirring time in our early Modern show more period when the ghosts under our bed and the threat of Old Scratch could be outdistanced. The noble products of this were the technology and the trappings of tolerance; unfortunately, it is an ongoing project. Voltaire is included as foil to many: Leibniz, Hume and Rousseau, but Voltaire captures something human and timeless, much as his Candide, when pondering the fortunes of the New World, quips it may not be better but at least it will be different. If only.

I am blessed with an adequate familiarity of all the thinkers cited. My chief course of improvement will be to read more Hume. Please forgive the possible vanity, but I often feel like a Hobbes or Spinoza, though I lack the talent and ambition of either. Leibniz had by far the coolest life and Rousseau was quite an asshole. show less