[.ca] Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (ISBN 0140159959)

Must reading for a better sense of the man:
I had been familiar with the Kenny book "Wittgenstein" and "Wittgenstein's Vienna" but after having read Monk's vol 1 on Russell knew this would be an excellent read. Oddly enough it left me with the question, "Are geniuses born or made?" Much of what Monk did for us with this book was give us a solid feel for the life of the person within which the philosophy could make sense. Why did Wittgenstein write the way he did? Answered. What issues drove him? Answered. I would say this book is must reading for a better sense of the man.

I think Monk performs his humble biographer's duty.:
I read this book to understand the enigmatic man that is Wittgenstein, with little intention to get to grips with his philosophy; but Monk seems to bind the man and his philosophy so well that I realized I could not understand the man without getting to grips with some of the broad fundamentals of his philosophy - and all of this ended up making for a very satisfying read, such is Monk's loving frankness in dealing with his subject. Monk provided so many quotes from Wittgenstein and his friends that I quickly settled into trusting him as a scholarly biographer, which is essential for putting the reader at ease in this genre. But Monk also provided his own interpretations, which did not make for a confused text, unlike some oher biographies, e.g., Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer". The result of Monk's work was that, on the one hand, there were enough quotations to allow one to form one's own judgement, to weigh up the pros and cons against Monk's own interpretations, but, on the other hand, plenty of Monk's views to help the reader flesh things out, while keeping a clear view of the facts. I reserve one small complaint for Monk's style: he has sufficient vocabulary and plenty of ways of forming his sentences, but he's not very literary - quite a laborious prose writer, I think; he completely lacks brilliance in style. Still, he is utterly competent, and the reason it is a small complaint, and doesn't affect my rating, is because the content of the book is so interesting, and style means nothing if the biography doesn't render a reasonably believable truth.

A wonderful introduction to the man and the work:
Aside from a quickly abandoned attempt to read the Tractatus as a pretentious freshman in college, I didn't know anything about Wittgenstein other than a few random facts. The ones that fascinated me were that, after finished his first book, he went off to teach in a rural primary school; that he had been commended for bravery several times in WWI; and that among his last words, when his friends were arriving too late to see him on his deathbed, were "tell them I've had a wonderful life." There was something fascinating about all of this existing in one man, so when a philosophy professor I ran into at a wedding recommended this book as the place to start, I rushed to pick it up. Loosely speaking, great men have two types of lives: the ones devoted to an ethical or aesthetic mission, and the ones whose lives are less streamlined, more variegated. For the former, their lives slip naturally into a type of narrative with a few basic themes: you can see them make progress towards the goal that they have set for themselves. Biographies of people like Gandhi, for example, can be slim and focused. For the others, whose lives are messy and not motivated by a few basic concerns, I prefer baggy biographies, that revel in small details: Ellman's Joyce, for example, or The Life of Johnson. Wittgenstein is a curious combination of the two, because he is almost obsessively motivated by a goal of religious and moral purity that directs his entire life; and yet, his actions (and choice of partners) are so cyclical that occasionally you start losing track of people, and feeling like you've read the chapter before: the same suicidal streak, another timid, gentle male partner. Monk handles this well: he writes beautifully (and colloquially, in the best possible sense) and isn't afraid of passionate engagement. The book is beautifully structured, and the themes that surface continually in Wittgenstein's life are brought up gracefully and juggled with consummate skill. I only occasionally felt like Monk tried too hard to fit Wittgenstein's life into the framework he created. Wittgenstein's love of pulp detective fiction, for example, is supposed to indicate how much he valued intuition instead of a deductive style of reasoning, and connects to the philosophy of the later years? Maybe he just liked detective stories: lots of people have. Monk's desire for a coherent narrative also makes him leave out parts that I thought would be fascinating. He mentions a thank you note of Rilke's that Wittgenstein really liked, but he doesn't quote it; Wittgenstein discusses a poem that he loves with his friend for a whole letter, but the poem is never quoted - it's those kinds of technically unnecessary little bits that might have illuminated a great deal (or just been interesting). But Monk also has an eye for the wonderful detail - and he has clearly dug up almost everything that can be found on W. - like the diary of a 14-year boy whose father he visited. This is also a good introduction to W's work, although not really an in-depth exploration. I disagree with the reviewer who said that this book was a deflation of genius. At the end of this book, I still admired the demands that Wittgenstein made on himself, his honesty, his determination, and his generosity, but I was further convinced that a genius should not be trusted for opinions on any subject but his own narrow discipline. Anyway, read this book; I enjoyed it a lot.

A good road map of fundamentals of philosophical thinking:
The Duty of Genius is a book about a tormented man who tried to change the world he lived in, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher's philosopher. His goals were breath taking: nothing less than to discuss the philosophical basis of the Mathematics, something of the utmost importance for men like Bertrand Russel, G.E.Moore and Norton Whitehead, the most important philosophers at the time. To all of them, and to some important Austrian and German philosophers in Wittgestein's circle, the work of Wittgestein was to be known as a watershed event. Almost at the same time, still a youth, he was the pupil and master of Bertrand Russell, to whom he later exerted an almost opressive power, even of determining what was right or wrong in Russell's train of tought. Whenever it happened, Russell got depressive almost in a childlike manner, discarding what he did in order to attain a more solid ground. To Russell, Wittgenstein was the heir presumptive of his thinking, due to both his genius and to the vigour Wittgenstein had as a brilliant youth. But Ludwig Wittgenstein himself was a troubled soul, deeply tormented by the ghosts of three elder brothers who comitted suicide and who did not resist the pressure exerted on them by his authoritarian father, who wanted his sons to pursue a business career in the family company. Ludwig was of Jewish ascendancy but, with all his family, had to hide/disguise his Jewish background in order to be accepted in the Austrian aristocratic society where his father prospered as a businessman; Ludwig later gave up all his immense wealth to family and friends, trying to dismiss himself with all associations of his noble birth, working many years as a teacher in a fundamental school in rural Austria and later trying to work as a simple workman in Soviet Union; he enlisted voluntarily and fought for his country in the First World War, getting many medals for heroism in the battlefield, lived many months secluded from the world in a rural cabin in Norway, and was reclusive to the point of depression, etc..Concerning money, he was determined not to beg anyone's money (Keynes included) in order to pursue his philosophical objectives. His bisexuality was hidden, due to his propensity to hide his emotions from others. Despite all the peculiarities of Ludwig's life, the book does not attain the same level of the other biographies Mr.Ray Monk made on Bertrand Russel, but this maybe due to the fact that Bertrand Russell was a much more complex man, with many wives, lovers, children and friends, in my opinion, a much more popular and media attractive subject than Wittgenstein. Despite everything, the book is a pretty much good one, and guides the reader trough the intricacies of philosophical thinking.

Edification about and from Wittgenstein:
Monk was substantially assisted in this work by his conversations with the late Rush Rhees, Wittgentein's translator and literary executor. Having myself had the privilege of hearing Rhees lecture on Wittgenstein, this vivid and searching book has all the ring of authenticity. It is at once a biography and a general reader's introduction to Wittgenstein's thought, which brilliantly brings out the fact that the mysteries of meaning in language form a central key to the human condition. Claimed by logical positivists, Wittgenstein's life is arguably a demonstration of what he saw as the inadequacy of a purely secularist framework to meaning in language. Monk successfully brings out the religious and mystical overtones to Wittgenstein's vigorous, propositional labours in philosophy. Monk's treatment of Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty' is a joy to read; in fact, much of the book is tremendously edifying.