Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, Anthony Gottlieb, Yale University Press, £16.99

Ludwig Wittgenstein was and remains the most important, controversial and strange philosopher of the 20th century. He died in 1951, aged 62, having baffled or inspired other philosophers and, indeed, almost everybody he met. He was a great teacher of schoolchildren and students and a passionate lover, mostly of men, but the word ‘gay’ cannot be easily applied to a man of such monumental seriousness. One of his most lucid and celebrated statements appears in Tractatus, the one book published in his lifetime.

‘Whereof’, he wrote, ‘one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

This did not mean you should not say certain things, it meant there were things that lay beyond language. But what things? The inadequacy of language to explain ourselves and the world was the heart of the matter; he wished to conquer the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’.

This book is a lucid, brilliant biography and explanation of the man and his thinking. I am not quite sure why it is subtitled Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, but whereof I cannot speak, etc. The biography is as startling as the philosophy. He was born into a rich family in Vienna, but wealth did not confer happiness. Ludwig and Paul, a brilliant one-handed pianist, were the only survivors of five children – the other three killed themselves. This was a fashionable act in Habsburg Vienna; it was said to be the suicide capital of Europe.

‘If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed,’ Wittgenstein wrote in some unpublished notes. ‘If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.’

The Wittgensteins were a very musical family and Ludwig was  an ‘artistic whistler’, able to whistle large parts of the classical repertoire. But not Brahms, a composer who, he said, ‘has brought music to a full stop’. He told a story of passing a music shop with portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin in the window, and then a bookshop with portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein: ‘Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.’

Music, of course, is a form of knowledge that does not necessarily require words. It was freedom from the bewitchment of language.

Initially, he had been interested in engineering. He had been a student of aeronautical engineering at Manchester, but he disdained many of the claims of science to the point where he described Einstein as ‘just a bloody journalist’. He then moved to Cambridge where he introduced himself to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose interests were logic and the philosophy of mathematics. Initially, Russell could not cope with the way he dominated every conversation and described him as a bore. But, later, he was so impressed that he said Wittgenstein would take ‘the next big step forward in philosophy’. Others remained irritated by his overbearing manner. Talking to Wittgenstein, said one victim, ‘was like living through the day of judgment. It was terrible.’

But what was the next big step? His first book – and the only one published in his lifetime – was the Tractatus, published in 1918. He had fought heroically in the First World War, but, somehow, he managed to complete this extraordinary work. It was an attempt to explain how a proposition could mean something. He concluded they were pictures of reality. The book, as Gottlieb acknowledges, was flawed, but it remains one of – if not the – most important philosophical works of our time. The book published after his death, Philosophical Investigations, contained 784 questions of which 90 per cent were left unanswered. He was trying to undermine the absurdity of, as Gottlieb puts it, ‘philosophical doubts about everyday things’.

‘My life’, said Wittgenstein, ‘consists of being content to accept many things.’

Contentment is strange coming from this perpetually discontented man. But it simply means that he believed much of philosophy to be misguided and pointless. In his final days he continued to question all that he had thought and written. But he remained irritable. A book of philosophical essays by assorted writers was said by one reviewer to ‘derive their creed from the great Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein’. In a letter he responded by condemning all of them as charlatans and declared that he wanted someone to ‘debunk these humbugs’.

Gottlieb’s book blends all these issues of philosophy, history, character and life. He shows that to understand the philosopher is also to understand the man. My own impression is that the man had a religious impulse which was sublimated in his work. The inexpressible that lay beyond language would, in other minds, be a route to God. I am just glad Ludwig is not around to relieve me of that ‘delusion’.