I've also noticed that for the last few months my Goodreads reviews have become increasingly Reviews Without Books. What’s odd about the timing of this book (between the Musil volumes) is that as I read it, I inevitably began to draw parallels between Wittgenstein and Musil. So I picked this up and just started reading, thinking I’d put it down after just a taste, but it wouldn’t let me stop! I read it compulsively. I've never read any Wittgenstein before this, and I rarely read any philosophy either, but I came across this book at just the right time: I had finished the first book of The Man Without Qualities and was awaiting the second book’s arrival via Amazon. This book belongs to this second category. These are happy accidents that happen to fall along my path so that I could not ignore them. The second category are books that seek me out. These constitute the majority of my reading. First are the books that I actively seek out because someone recommended it to me, or I’ve been thinking about certain topics. Most of my reading falls into two categories. Obviously, he was not always likeable, but he was always so much himself, a singularity whose contradictions made him even more who he was. At other times, he was more like an artist with his severe judgements and social outbursts, and his tendency for perfectionism in his writings.

In life too, he was obsessed with questions of honesty and self deception, and tortured himself terribly over moral questions.Īt times he seemed less like a philosopher and more like a religious figure with his ascetic lifestyle and exacting standards for his inner life.

If it didn’t do that (and he doubted if it did many times) then what good was it? Perhaps that's why he was intent on destroying philosophy as it was known then, uprooting it from its illusions of logic by exposing it to the sun. This method of illumination works more for Wittgenstein than it would for other philosophers because for Wittgenstein, philosophy was not a mere game (perhaps that’s one of the reasons he despised academic philosophers so much, and called them un-serious), philosophy was a way of living and thinking rightly in the real world, by stripping oneself of all the comforts of illusion. His ideas grew organically from his life, in the same way that his Picture Theory claims that a picture is not a mental representation of a fact but is a fact itself, so that understanding comes immediately from seeing (not through abstraction and representation). Flip-flop, mish-mosh, two sides of the same coin. Alternately, it illuminates his life by showing us his ideas. A book that illuminates Wittgenstein’s ideas by showing us his life.

Wittgenstein the duty of genius