Wittgenstein, part 4

Now, about Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For the non-philosophers, it’s pretty complex.

In a BBC 4 Great Lives radio program about Wittgenstein, the host, Matthew Parris, warned that, if the philosophy discussion ever got too deep, he would blow a whistle, which would be a sign that they should stop talking about philosophy and get back to talking about Wittgenstein’s life. I can’t blow a whistle in this post, but I will heed Parris’s warning, and will metaphorically blow my whistle if I feel that we are getting bogged down in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s masterpiece is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the century. However, its preface contains the statement, “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book.” And he is so right; the lay reader is in trouble even before starting the book. I certainly am.

The Tractatus is an extremely cryptic book. It is not prose; rather, it is eighty or so pages of numbered propositions. Wittgenstein did not use much technical terminology, but short words do not make the Tractatus any easier to understand. It begins with proposition 1, “The world is all that is the case,” and doesn’t get much better from there. If one can get one pearl of wisdom from the Tractatus, it would be its proposition 3, “A logical picture of facts is a thought.” Wittgenstein felt that the world could be understood in terms of pictures; put another way, “sentences are logical pictures of the world.” And with that, the whistle blows, and we will move on.

Wittgenstein, part 3

When we left Wittgenstein yesterday, he had gone to Germany at the end of his the 1911 summer break to meet Gottlob Frege, who urged him to get to know Bertrand Russell in Cambridge.

So he went back to England and started attending Russell’s classes. At the end of the semester, he famously asked Russell if he should switch to philosophy or go back to aeronautics. Russell remembers the exchange as follows:

At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: “Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?” I replied: “My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?” He said: “Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but if not, I shall become a philosopher."

In response, Russell asked him to write an essay on philosophy over winter break. When Wittgenstein returned in January with his essay, Russell read only the first page before telling Wittgenstein that he must stick with philosophy. Wittgenstein immediately transferred to Cambridge, and the rest is philosophical history.

Wittgenstein, part 2

So who was Ludwig Wittgenstein really? He was the youngest of nine children of one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Three of his older brothers committed suicide, two when Wittgenstein was still a boy, and a fourth brother, who was a concert pianist, lost his right arm in World War I. So he had a tough, although privileged, upbringing.

His father did not believe in sending his children to school, at least at a young age; he wanted them educated at home to prepare them for the business world. As a result, Wittgenstein did not attend school until he was sent at age fourteen to a technical high school, a Realschule, in Linz, Austria. Oddly, this was the same school that Adolf Hitler attended, although they did not know each other. They were the same age, but Hitler was two years behind.

Wittgenstein then attended the Technical University of Berlin (then called the Technische Hochschule) for mechanical engineering, graduating in 1908. In Berlin, he became interested in the then cutting edge field of aeronautical engineering, but also began his fascination with philosophy. Nevertheless, he was a dutiful son, and so, on his father’s recommendation, went to Manchester to study aeronautics.

Wittgenstein’s first research interest in Manchester was the dynamics of flying kites and how it related to the design of fixed wings. He spent some time designing and construction kites at a British kite weather station, but soon realized that the hot topic in aeronautics was engines, not kites, and so he switched his focus to engine and propeller design. But he still did not feel fulfilled by aeronautics and began studying pure mathematics in his spare time.

In November 1910, he submitted an application for a patent for a propeller with combustion chambers and reaction jets on the propeller’s tips. It was not, as some have suggested, a jet engine, but it was a start. Wittgenstein’s propeller was called innovative, ingenious, and ahead of his time; however, it did not lead directly to any aeronautical breakthroughs, and in fact was independently reinvented during World War II. Wittgenstein received his patent in August 1911, but he was already coming to the end of his engineering career. His mathematics work was taking over his life, and so, at the end of the 1911 summer break, he went to Germany to meet the great logician Gottlob Frege, who urged him to get to know the similarly celebrated Bertrand Russell in Cambridge.

This is a diagram of Wittgenstein's propeller. The combustion chambers are labeled C at each end of the propeller.

And this is about where aeronautical engineering ends and philosophy begins.

More tomorrow.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, polymath philosopher

Now that we have finally defined the polymath, we can start doing some other things. We can start looking at the Real Polymaths, and we can also figure out what a Renaissance man (person) is and what a universal man is. Are they any different from a polymath?

We’ll get into those soon enough, but, for today, a real polymath.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, polymath!

Wittgenstein, really? Wasn’t he a philosopher? Yes, but, believe it or not, he studied engineering before turning to philosophy. He went to a technical institute in Berlin and studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester in England back in the earliest days of flight. He even received a patent for a jet-tipped propeller blade (not quite a jet engine, but close) in 1911 before giving up mathematics and engineering for philosophy.

While his arguments in his classic (and close to incomprehensible to most lay people) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are figuratively in the clouds, his propeller design might actually have gotten him there.

Aeronautical engineering and philosophy are about as far away as two fields of study can possibly get from each other. For his feats in each, Wittgenstein has to be considered a polymath.

More tomorrow.

more on the value of polymathy

Former Brown University librarian Harry Koopman wrote that, “without the possession of a vast array of facts, no strength of mind can make a scholar.”