Volume 38, Number 3 · January 31, 1991
'A Wonderful Life'
By Stuart Hampshire
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
by Ray Monk
Free Press, 654 pp., $29.95
This is a wholly admirable biography. It is not easy to combine a continuous and intelligible story of a man's life with a succinct account of his changing philosophical doctrines. Ray Monk succeeds both with the life and with the doctrines and he is the first person to make entirely clear the substantial interaction between them. He reports that he has had the full cooperation of Wittgenstein's literary executors and he quotes freely from the more intimate and unphilosophical parts of Wittgenstein's unpublished manuscripts. It is an odd fact about Wittgenstein that his peculiar nature as a person, and his true ambitions as a philosopher, have only been gradually revealed to an inquiring public, who for many years were provoked to ever-increasing curiosity by the mysteries and rumors surrounding his reputation, mysteries that even extended to the name itself. The step-by-step unraveling of the mysteries over the years has certainly contributed to his fame and perhaps also to the continuing enchantments of his philosophy.
Review, 5187 words
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