Category: Wittgenstein

Kirchberg am Wechsel

In April 2001 an Austrian newspaper published an article titled „The philosopher, the cave, and the bats“ referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Herrmannshöhle (Herman’s Cave) near Kirchberg am Wechsel and its bats. It is common to link Wittgenstein to Kirchberg am Wechsel and its neighbouring St. Corona, but it is still rather batty.

For he never spent much time in either town. And he certainly never taught there and only visited these places on rare occasions.

Nevertheless, searching the internet you will come across learned pages claiming that Wittgenstein spent some time as a teacher in Kirchberg, or even that he was born there. In 2000, a local newspaper announced that he (still) participates in Kirchberg’s philosophical symposia. He would have been 111 years old by then.

Wittgenstein visited Kirchberg’s church once with his pupils to have them sing and experience the building’s acoustics. At another time he reluctantly participated in a conference of the committee of primary schools of the Feistritz-Valley. The conference wasn’t a big success and Wittgenstein kept mum while his colleagues debated pedagogical strategies. On his way home, Wittgenstein promised himself never again to waste time at a similar gathering, which seemed to him a perfect example of a nonsensical event.

These instances would hardly qualify Kirchberg to stand for any kind of Wittgenstein-landscape. But being the home of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society (ALWS) and thus the location for International Wittgenstein Symposia ever since 1976 are reasons enough.

Wittgenstein Landscape

Landscapes, or: “Life is nowhere easy.”

 

“Life is nowhere easy.” – In July 1923, Wittgenstein wrote this sentence to his friend, the high-school teacher Ludwig Hänsel (1886–1959).

If we imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein in an actual landscape, three sceneries immediately come to mind: First, the Norwegian Sognefjord with its rivers and rivulets – where Wittgenstein built himself a wooden house on the steep banks of the Eidsvatnet lake. Second, the lonesome shores of Ireland. And third, the “Bucklige Welt”, the area in Lower Austria where from 1920 onwards he spent six years as a primary school teacher in the towns of Trattenbach, Puchberg and Otterthal, a region he already knew from his childhood, since his parents owned a massive hunting lodge on the Hochreith near St. Aegyd.

John Donne‘s well-known Meditation XVII begins with the words “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”. If we read about Wittgenstein’s life as a primary school teacher in the hills of southern Lower Austria, we get the impression that to his peers he must have seemed like someone who aims at becoming an island in Donne’s sense.

His colleagues and neighbours certainly experienced him as such: a nobleman amongst the poor, an academic among farmers and workers, one, who never spoke in dialect, never frequented the local inn and seldom ever went to Sunday mass. An oddball who did not dress like a teacher, who did not greet on the street … – in short, a strange fellow who made “a curious impression” as Johanna Berger, a contemporary witness, remarked.

One common opinion holds that the places Wittgenstein had graced with his genius loci should be approached like a pilgrimage to saintly hermit’s home. “Hiking with Wittgenstein”, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: from Genius to primary-school teacher”, “Askesis in the South of Lower Austria”, “Wittgenstein-Cult in Trattenbach”, “The philosopher’s washbasin” (another myth: Wittgenstein never used it), “Perhaps you’ll have some time to philosophise in your holidays?” and “From Wittgenstein to summer toboggan run” are but a few titles of articles one comes across. And in the first, now out-of-print, edition of a documentary on Wittgenstein in Kirchberg am Wechsel one could find “documents from the life of a brilliant, lonesome man”.

What makes this landscape a “Wittgenstein-landscape”?

(Text by Elisabeth Leinfellner, from „Ludwig Wittgenstein“ – Ein Volksschullehrer in Niederösterreich”, translated by David Wagner.)
(Photo: View of the Hochwechsel | © Christian Kremsl)

His Life – His Work

Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889 in Vienna, Austria, to a wealthy industrial family, well-situated in intellectual and cultural Viennese circles.

In 1908 he began his studies in aeronautical engineering at Manchester University where his interest in the philosophy of pure mathematics led him to Gottlob Frege. Upon Frege’s advice, in 1911 he went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote, upon meeting Wittgenstein: “An unknown German appeared […] obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid” (quoted by Monk 1990: 38f). Within one year, Russell was committed: “I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things […] I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve” (quoted by Monk 1990: 41).

Russell’s insight was accurate. Wittgenstein was idiosyncratic in his habits and way of life, yet profoundly acute in his philosophical sensitivity.

During his years in Cambridge, from 1911 to 1913, Wittgenstein conducted several conversations on philosophy and the foundations of logic with Russell, with whom he had an emotional and intense relationship, as well as with Moore and Keynes. He retreated to isolation in Norway, for months at a time, in order to ponder these philosophical problems and to work out their solutions. In 1913 he returned to Austria and in 1914, at the start of World War I (1914–1918), joined the Austrian army. He was taken captive in 1918 and spent the remaining months of the war at a prison camp. It was during the war that he wrote the notes and drafts of his first important work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. After the war the book was published in German and translated into English.

In 1920 Wittgenstein, now divorced from philosophy (having, to his mind, solved all philosophical problems in the Tractatus), gave away his part of his family’s fortune and pursued several ‘professions’ (gardener, teacher, architect, etc.) in and around Vienna.

It was only in 1929 that he returned to Cambridge to resume his philosophical vocation, after having been exposed to discussions on the philosophy of mathematics and science with members of the Vienna Circle, whose conception of logical empiricism was indebted to his Tractatus’ account of logic as tautologous, and his philosophy as concerned with logical syntax. During these first years in Cambridge his conception of philosophy and its problems underwent dramatic changes that are recorded in several volumes of conversations, lecture notes, and letters (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar). Sometimes termed the ‘middle Wittgenstein’, this period heralds a rejection of dogmatic philosophy, including both traditional works and the Tractatus itself.

In the 1930s and 1940s Wittgenstein conducted seminars at Cambridge, developing most of the ideas that he intended to publish in his second book, Philosophical Investigations. These included the turn from formal logic to ordinary language, novel reflections on psychology and mathematics, and a general skepticism concerning philosophy’s pretensions.

In 1945 he prepared the final manuscript of the Philosophical Investigations, but, at the last minute, withdrew it from publication (and only authorized its posthumous publication). For a few more years he continued his philosophical work, but this is marked by a rich development of, rather than a turn away from, his second phase. He travelled during this period to the United States and Ireland, and returned to Cambridge, where he was diagnosed with cancer. Legend has it that, at his death in 1951, his last words were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life” (Monk: 579).

 

All references in this text are to: Monk, Ray, 1990, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York: Macmillan.
Source of this Biographical Sketch: Biletzki, Anat and Matar, Anat, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/wittgenstein/>.