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Friedrich Hayek’s recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016)
- sswaner 7y agoI love the last line of this recollection: "But I simply could not find him. Whether he regretted having become so deeply engaged, or had discovered that, after all, I was just another Philistine, I do not know. At any rate, I never saw him again." That seems to reinforce the philosopher as enigma, perhaps fitting for the philosopher who thought all philosophical problems had been solved with the publication of Tractatus.
- throwlaplace 7y ago>philosopher who thought all philosophical problems had been solved with the publication of Tractatus. people repeat this all of the time but it's not true. he wrote Philosophical Investigations in 53 approximately 32 years after tractatus.
- simonh 7y agoMaybe he changed his mind.
- LiquidSky 7y agoBut it is true. He did think that after he wrote the Tractatus. It's just that later he came to believe he had been mistaken.
- StuffedParrot 7y agoMistaken about what assertion, precisely? His later work built upon the fallout of the Tractatus. Given that the Tractatus isn’t a normative work and is more akin to a hand grenade than something you can argue with, and Philosophical Investigations is a highly normative work, I am curious where you interpret that he believed he made a mistake. Critique ≠ thinking it is a mistake
- sswaner 7y agoHe felt that the premises and conclusions of the Tractatus were overly strict and not a complete philosophy. Philosophical Investigations expands and replaces parts of his earlier philosophy.
- StuffedParrot 7y agoI agree, no argument here.
- voldacar 7y agoThanks for posting, I know both of these fellows have significant followings on this site. It's a shame they never talked politics, that probably would have made for some very intriguing material
- llcoolv 7y agoAnd also very difficult to comprehend. Concretics of politics had been much different back then.
- nickik 7y agoThis time in Vienna was really rather interesting. So many intellectual projects and groups going on in Vienna. Economists, philosophy and of course Freud and so on. Hayek came in contact with quite a few interesting characters, including Bukharin who would be the leading economist among the Bolsheviks. They didn't agree on much unfortunately.
- a_bonobo 7y agoIf you can, read Zweig's The World Of Yesterday, a memoir on life in Vienna before WW1. It's surely rose-tinted, but the amount of culture and intellectual life was outstanding, what an enormous loss. (Hitler also lived there at the time, going to the same class as Wittgenstein for a year or two, neither remembering each other later)
- antupis 7y agoAlso Trotski, Stalin, Tito and Freud lived in Vienna same time https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
- keiferski 7y agoAnd of course all the artists; Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, to name a few.
- jhbadger 7y agoThere's also a good recent book by Karl Sigmund called "Exact Thinking in Demented Times" which is about the Logical Positivists in Vienna during this period (and the later interwar period) which included Wittgenstein.
- a_bonobo 7y agoWith a preface by Douglas R Hofstadter, nice! I'll get it, thank you :)
- bloak 7y ago
- grabbalacious 7y ago>Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. This kind of blanket criticism is counterproductive and harmful. Our conventions 'know' more than we do and should be criticised only where they themselves seem to be causing harm.
- ncmncm 7y agoThat's just, like, your opinion, man. But it is a deeply distracting activity. Not finding something worthy of concentrated attention might be a character flaw.
- grabbalacious 7y agoNo, I explained it, Lebowski! I myself have been involved in circles where this strange form of philosophical posturing or virtue-signalling has reigned. They are short-lived circles. It may or may not have something to do with the total and rapid collapse of intellectual life in Vienna or the suicides mentioned in the article. I don't know. But it is a sign of decay. (OK, that last bit was opinion.)
- ncmncm 7y agoThe real problem is that the activity hinges on objectivity, but it is at all points apparent to an observer from any distance that objectivity is overwhelmingly harder to attain than any of the goals of the activity. The goals themselves are tainted.
- intuitionist 7y agoThe anecdote of Wittgenstein brandishing a fireplace poker at Karl Popper at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club is quite well known—but that incident happened after World War II was over. So if Hayek’s recollection here is accurate, he apparently made something of a habit of it.
- codeulike 7y agoproblems