There’s not much left for me now to “get” Wittgenstein beyond, er, reading and thinking about his actual philosophical writings. Monk’s reassuring biography comprehensively tells the/a story of his life, and famously-well weaves in the outlines of the philosophy as he goes. I didn’t get all of it, partly because Monk assumed greater familiarity with technical terms (e.g. phenomenological) than I have, and partly because, hey, it’s Wittgenstein.

Overall it’s interesting and a little concerning that such world-changing philosophy came from such a tortured and misfitting man; the feeling is that this is necessary, that only the unusual can think freely enough to jump-start us out of torpitude. Like poets perhaps, and that’s something I didn’t expect, the way W. leads the way from narrow Enlightenment “logic” to a strongly anti-scientific, anti-philosophical, humanities-based common-sense approach to life, reality and ethics. Rather like [phone rang; lost train of thought]…

Something I need to think about is of W. as an anti-Socrates figure (W. used the quotation from Lear about “teaching differences”); going round on a mission to show that philosophers use words in many different ways, rather than showing that ordinary people don’t know the single true meaning of a word. And much else, including his emphasis on Goethe’s analysis through comparisons, metaphors, similes – something Saussurean about this insistence on relationships between concepts. Much to think about.