On the Simple Life of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Philosophy as “Neverending Therapy”

In 1931, at the age of forty-one, Ludwig Wittgenstein mused in his diary that perhaps his name would live on only as the end point of Western philosophy—“like the name of the one who burnt down the library of Alexandria.” There probably was no such an arsonist. The books of ancient Alexandria seem to have perished mainly by rot and neglect, not in a single blaze.

And Western philosophy certainly did not come to an end with Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. He did not really believe that it would. Wittgenstein could get carried away when writing in his diaries, especially when contemplating himself, which he did often.

But he did think that he had found a fresh approach to philosophical problems. At least for a while and in some places, his influence changed how philosophy was done. A memorial brass in Trinity College, Cambridge, that stands on a wall behind statues of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon declares (in Latin):

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fellow of this College, Professor of Philosophy in the University for eight years, showed to many a new way of philosophizing . . . and taught by examples that reason should be freed from the snares of language.

In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he wrote while on military service in the 1914–18 war, Wittgenstein proclaimed that the problems of philosophy arise only because “the logic of our language is misunderstood.” Once this logic had been laid bare, the problems would be resolved once and for all, or so he then believed. He later came to think of philosophy as a never-ending form of therapy: it will be a continuing “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

He later came to think of philosophy as a never-ending form of therapy.

Wittgenstein once wrote that the business of philosophy is to “soothe the mind about meaningless questions.” He was echoing a passage from The Principles of Mechanics, published in 1894 by a physicist, Heinrich Hertz, which suggested that some questions about force and electricity are based on confusion and should be addressed not directly but by exposing the muddles that lay behind them. Such queries, Hertz wrote, “will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.”

Wittgenstein’s fundamental idea was to apply this thought to philosophy. He read Hertz when he was a teenager and liked quoting him to family and friends, mentioning this passage often in writings and talks. He once said that it seemed to him to “sum up philosophy.”

Philosophical questions had not usually been regarded as illegitimate or meaningless—not, at least, by philosophers. So this was quite a departure from traditional conceptions of the subject. Perhaps it was time for one. As Wittgenstein once put it to a friend: “Why should philosophy in the age of airplanes and automobiles be the same…as in the age when people travelled by coach or on foot?”

When he first arrived in Cambridge, on October 18, 1911, Wittgenstein was a twenty-two-year-old Austrian-born student of aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. He had made an appointment to visit the philosopher Bertrand Russell at Trinity College because he was interested in Russell’s writings about logic and the philosophy of mathematics. He never returned to engineering after this meeting.

In the decades after his death, Ludwig Wittgenstein came to be seen as one of the leading thinkers of the century. But in his lifetime, he was not the famous member of his family.

Eight months later, Russell astonished Wittgenstein’s eldest sister, Hermine, by telling her, “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.”

In the decades after his death, Ludwig Wittgenstein came to be seen as one of the leading thinkers of the century. But in his lifetime, he was not the famous member of his family. Outside the small world of philosophy, the better-known Wittgensteins were, first, Ludwig’s father, Karl, a Viennese industrialist who died in 1913, and then one of Ludwig’s brothers, Paul, a concert pianist whose international career began in the 1920s.

In 1913, The Economist called Karl Wittgenstein “the most prominent person in the history of modern Austrian industry.” The “Carnegie of Austria,” as he was widely known, wrote provocative newspaper columns and delivered speeches to businessmen in America. At home, his fame made him a target of the Viennese satirist and critic Karl Kraus, whose journal, Die Fackel, portrayed him as a thieving speculator and exploiter of the working man, and twice compared him to Phineas Barnum, a notorious American showman.

But most of Karl Wittgenstein’s press was more positive. On the day after his death, Vienna’s leading daily, Die Neue Freie Presse, devoted almost as much space to his patronage of the arts as it did to his business career. Karl was the principal backer of the Viennese “Secession” movement—a group of young artists, including Gustav Klimt, who saw themselves as seceding from the artistic establishment. The family’s townhouse, known to outsiders as the Palais Wittgenstein, was one of Vienna’s leading music salons. The city’s most celebrated living composer, Brahms, who was friendly with several members of two generations of the Wittgenstein family, lived around the corner from the Palais and visited often.

There were many amateur musicians in the family, but the only one to make a career of music was Karl’s second-youngest child, Paul. For more than three decades, Paul played the halls of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and many other places from Athens to Zagreb. He performed under the batons of the grandest conductors, including Richard Strauss and Bruno Walter, both of whom were family friends, and of rising stars, such as the young Leonard Bernstein and Sir Adrian Boult.

When Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl’s youngest child, died in England in 1951, his obituary in the Times put him in the wrong family.

Some of the attention Paul received from the world’s press was due to a sensational oddity: he played with only one hand. His right arm had been amputated at the elbow while he was serving in the Austrian army in 1914.

With heroic determination, Paul developed techniques that enabled him to become a concert pianist despite his injury. “After the first few moments of wondering how the devil he had accomplished it,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune in a concert review, “one almost forgot that one was listening to a player whose right sleeve hung empty at his side.” Paul used his family’s wealth to commission one-handed piano works from Ravel, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and at least fourteen other composers.

When Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl’s youngest child, died in England in 1951, his obituary in the Times put him in the wrong family. The newspaper did not seem to realize that he was related to the Karl Wittgenstein or the Paul Wittgenstein who had featured in its pages, and it reported, incorrectly, that “his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon.”

Ludwig’s distant paternal ancestors were in fact German Jewish merchants, not warlike princes. They came from a county in North Rhine-Westphalia that was named after the Sayn-Wittgenstein family, one member of which, Prince Peter of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Ludwigsburg-Berleburg, did indeed fight against Napoleon. The Jewish Wittgensteins adopted the name in the early nineteenth century. Later, Ludwig’s paternal grandparents converted to Christianity. But like many converted former Jews and assimilated Jews in Europe at the time, their real religion was German culture, especially German music.

The Times likened Ludwig to “a religious contemplative of the hermit type.” This was almost apt. He often sought solitude, retreating many times to an isolated house in Norway, and in later years to lonely spots in Ireland.

In 1919, he gave away all of his money to some of his siblings, and thereafter lived a simple life, but in a complicated way. It was harder to cast off the restlessness that he shared with his father than it was to relinquish the wealth that he had inherited from him.

After more or less abandoning philosophy at the end of the First World War, Ludwig trained to be an elementary-school teacher, spent time as a gardener’s assistant in a monastery, and then taught in small towns in rural Austria. He gave up schoolmastering in April 1926, had another stint of gardening, then worked for two years as a self-taught architect, designing a house in Vienna for his youngest sister, Gretl.

In 1929 he returned to Cambridge and philosophy, and mostly taught there until 1947, when he resigned his professorship. He spent his last years in guesthouses, hotels, borrowed cottages, or with friends. When he had been teaching in Cambridge, living in a spartan style, he was often tempted to leave and do something else. Among the alternatives he considered were manual labor on a collective farm in Russia, medicine, and psychiatry. In earlier life, he told Bertrand Russell, he had considered becoming a monk.

Sometimes he was too hard on himself, apologizing abjectly for trivial matters and regretting flaws that probably only he saw.

He would have been as unusual a monk as he was a philosopher. “I am not a religious man,” Ludwig told a close friend, “but I can’t help seeing everything from a religious point of view.” When he was a soldier, he wrote in his notebooks that “Christianity is the only sure way to happiness,” but he had little interest in Jesus and none in going to church.

He had fallen under the influence of Tolstoy’s watered-down The Gospel in Brief, in which Christianity is presented not as a divine revelation or even as a historical phenomenon but as “a teaching that gives meaning to life.” Wittgenstein often read the New Testament. He still buzzed around it like an “insect around the light,” as he put it nearly twenty-five years after first encountering Tolstoy’s Gospel. And there were many occasions when he prayed fervently. But it is not clear to whom or what he was praying. Hermine reported in 1918 that “Ludwig knows no external God.” A Catholic friend’s opinion was that he “did not adhere to any form of Christian belief.”

To Ludwig, the notion of God was above all “the thought of the fearful judge.” Tormented by his own shortcomings, he yearned for a salvation that he often expressed in terms of a desire to be anständig—decent or upstanding. He sometimes used the language of religion to articulate his guilt and his hopes, which is perhaps one reason why he said that he saw things from a religious point of view: “I am a worm, but through God I will become a man,” as he put it in a wartime notebook.

He berated himself above all for vanity and conceit. He was, as he acknowledged, vain even about his own vices, noting in his diary that hardly any of his self-reproaches were “written entirely without the feeling that at least it is nice that I see my faults.”

Sometimes he was too hard on himself, apologizing abjectly for trivial matters and regretting flaws that probably only he saw. In 1931 he wrote in a notebook that “I am uncommonly cowardly, & I behave in life like a coward in battle.” Yet he did not behave like a coward in battle when he actually was in battle. He was decorated for bravery several times during his military service.

It was, if not vanity, then at least a remarkable degree of self-belief that enabled the twenty-two-year-old Ludwig to seek out Bertrand Russell and debate with him as an equal. This was at a time when Wittgenstein knew little philosophy and had no qualifications except an engineering diploma from Berlin and an undistinguished school record.

A similar self-assured determination marked his later career. He scorned the idea that academic regulations should apply to him, and he set out to refashion philosophy according to his own lights. The one-armed pianism of his brother Paul showed what the iron will of a Wittgenstein could achieve when he set out to do things in his own way. Their father set an example for both of them.

Karl’s obituary in the Neue Freie Presse noted that his way of life was “thoroughly original and conducted in a style that he himself had created” and that he had “an inborn lack of respect for authorities and conventions.” But not every Wittgenstein managed to make his own way. Paul and Ludwig were the only two of Karl’s five sons who did not kill themselves.

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Excerpted from Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb, published October 21, 2025, by Yale Jewish Lives. Copyright c 2025 by Anthony Gottlieb. All rights reserved.