Wittgenstein: My Wicked Heart

Abstract

Abstract Was Wittgenstein a spiritual as well as a philosophical genius? Ray Monk’s exceptionally fine and fat biography puts us in a better position to answer this question than we have been hitherto. Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character is with the photographs that exist of his face. He himself advised friends to pay more attention to people’s faces and often passed remarks about the faces of others, saying (according to Theodore Redpath) of Locke that he had “a nice face,” of Descartes that he had “the face of a murderer,” of T. S. Eliot that he had “a modern face” (meant disapprovingly). I recommend, in particular, a striking picture of Wittgenstein, reproduced in Monk’s book, which was taken in Swansea in 1945 by Ben Richards—a young man almost forty years Wittgenstein’s junior, with whom he was then despairingly in love.