Friedrich Hayek’s recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Friedrich Hayek’s recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016)

notesonliberty.com

94 pointsbrandonlc26 comments

This 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.

If 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)

There'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.

With a preface by Douglas R Hofstadter, nice! I'll get it, thank you :)

Also Trotski, Stalin, Tito and Freud lived in Vienna same time https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771

And of course all the artists; Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, to name a few.

I think they were at the same school but not in the same class. There's a theory (more fun than plausible) that Hitler was influenced by Wittgenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jew_of_Linz

One of the problems with the theory is perhaps that other children at school are unlikely to have known about Wittgenstein's Jewish ancestry: his immediate family were practising Roman Catholics; one doesn't normally advertise the religion of one's grandparents.

Of course if Hitler also denied remembering Wittgenstein that would be another problem with the theory. The linked Wikipedia page doesn't seem to mention that.

You're right, they were the same age and at the same school but apparently Hitler had to repeat a grade and Wittgenstein was pushed one grade ahead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#Jewish_bac...

Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914 by Frederic Morton

https://www.amazon.com/Thunder-at-Twilight-Vienna-1913-1914/...

>In an astonishing work of literary energy and historical insight, the author of The Rothschilds brings us the backstage dynamics that preceded the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the deed that precipitated WW I. Morton captures both the elegant decadence of Emperor Franz Joseph's Vienna, and the potent spirits of those revolutionary thinkers who, all in Vienna at some time during the two years before the war, would blow away the past and create modernity. There were Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin; Freud and Jung; the glowering Hitler; Kafka, Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus; and a small band of Serb nationalists, one of whom fired the shot that catapulted Franz Joseph, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas into a war they didn't want but couldn't prevent, and that reduced them to puppets.

I 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.

>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.

Maybe he changed his mind.

Yes he eventually decided the tractatus had some oroblems

It's a big part of his philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#LateWitt

But 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.

Mistaken 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

He 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.

I agree, no argument here.

The 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.

Thanks 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

And also very difficult to comprehend. Concretics of politics had been much different back then.

problems

>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.

That'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.

No, 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.)

The 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.

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