Teacher training in Vienna, the Prater
In September 1919 he enrolled in the
Lehrerbildungsanstalt (teacher training college) in the
Kundmanngasse in Vienna. His sister Hermine said that Wittgenstein working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates, but the family decided not to interfere.
He moved out of the family home and into lodgings in
Untere Viaduktgasse in Vienna's third district, and it was during this period that, according to William Warren Bartley, a professor of philosophy at Stanford, Wittgenstein engaged in a series of rough, casual homosexual encounters in an area of the city called the
Prater, within walking distance of his lodgings. It is a controversial claim, one that Bartley first made in 1973 in his biography
Wittgenstein, and denied at the time by Wittgenstein's executors and friends in England, who seemed to argue that, although Wittgenstein was not heterosexual, he had not actually engaged in gay sex. Bartley writes that he obtained the information from Wittgenstein's friends at the time. It was this activity, he argues, that Wittgenstein was referring to when he wrote to one of his friends, the architect Paul Engelmann, in May 1920: "Things have gone utterly miserably for me lately. Of course only because of my own baseness and rottenness. I have continually thought about taking my own life, and now too this thought still haunts me.
I have sunk to the bottom. May you never be in that position!" The literary executors threatened legal action to suppress publication of Bartley's book, according to an afterword he included in a later edition in 1985. Bartley writes that a whispering campaign began against him, with one British literary critic writing, "The general line here is that you are to be drummed out of the trade and that no academic invitation of any kind will be extended to you from the United Kingdom henceforth ..."
Teaching posts in Austria
In 1920 he was given his first job as a primary school teacher in Trattenbach, a village of just a few hundred. His first letters describe it as beautiful, but in October 1921, he wrote to Russell: "I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere." He was soon the object of gossip among the villagers, who found him eccentric at best. He didn't get on well with the other teachers; when he found his lodgings too noisy, he made a bed for himself in the school kitchen. He was an enthusiastic teacher, offering late-night extra tuition to several of the boys—something that Bartley writes did not help him in his relations with their parents—some of whom came to adore him; his sister Hermine watched him teach some of them, and said they "literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations."
To the less abled, it seems that he became something of a tyrant. The first two hours of each day were devoted to mathematics, hours that Monk writes some of the pupils recalled years later with horror. They reported that he caned the boys and boxed their ears, and also that he pulled the girls' hair; this was not unusual at the time for boys, but for the villagers he went too far in doing it to the girls too; girls were not expected to understand algebra, much less have their ears boxed over it. The physicality apart, he quickly became a village legend, shouting "
Krautsalat!" when the headmaster played the piano, and "Nonsense!" when a priest was answering children's questions.
Publication of the Tractatus
While Wittgenstein was living in isolation in rural Austria, the
Tractatus was published to considerable interest, first in German in 1921 as
Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, part of Wilhelm Ostwald's journal
Annalen der Naturphilosophie, though Wittgenstein was not happy with the result and called it a pirate edition. Russell had agreed to write an introduction to explain why it was important, because it was otherwise unlikely to have been published: it was difficult if not impossible to understand, and Wittgenstein was unknown in philosophy. But Wittgenstein was not happy with Russell's help. He had lost faith in Russell, finding him glib and his philosophy mechanistic, and felt he had fundamentally misunderstood the
Tractatus.
An English translation was prepared in Cambridge by Frank Ramsey, a mathematics undergraduate at King's commissioned by C. K. Ogden. It was G.E. Moore who suggested
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the title, an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Initially there were difficulties in finding a publisher for the English edition too, because Wittgenstein was insisting it appear without Russell's introduction; Cambridge University Press turned it down for that reason. Finally in 1922 an agreement was reached with Wittgenstein that Kegan Paul would print a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation. This is the translation that was approved by Wittgenstein, but it is problematic in a number of ways. Wittgenstein's English was poor at the time, and Ramsey was a teenager who had only recently learned German, so philosophers often prefer to use a 1961 translation by David Pears and Brian McGuinness.
The aim of the
Tractatus is to reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown. Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and therefore the limits of what can be thought. The limits of language, for Wittgenstein, are the limits of thought. Much of philosophy involves attempts to say the unsayable, and by implication the unthinkable: "what can we say at all can be said clearly," he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be. He wrote in the preface: "The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)."
The book is devoted to explaining what a meaningful proposition is (what is asserted when a sentence is used meaningfully). It is 75 pages long—"As to the shortness of the book, I am
awfully sorry for it ... If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me," he told Ogden—and presents seven numbered propositions (1–7), with various sub-levels (1, 1.1, 1.11):
- Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist.
- :The world is all that is the case.
- Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
- :What is the case...a fact...is the existence of states of affairs.
- Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
- :A logical picture of facts is a thought.
- Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.
- :A thought is a proposition with a sense.
- Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze.
- :A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
- Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion ist: [\bar p,\bar\xi, N(\bar\xi)]. Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes.
- :The general form of a truth-function is: [\bar p,\bar\xi, N(\bar\xi)]. This is the general form of a proposition.
- Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
- :What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Visit from Frank Ramsey, Puchberg
In September 1922 he moved to a secondary school in a nearby village, Hassbach, but the people there were just as bad—"These people are not human
at all but loathsome worms," he wrote to a friend—and he left after a month. In November he began work at another primary school, this time in Puchberg in the Schneeberg mountains. There, he told Russell, the villagers were one-quarter animal and three-quarters human. He was miserable. He had no one he could discuss philosophy with, which was particularly frustrating given that the
Tractatus was now the subject of much debate in Cambridge and among the Vienna Circle.
Frank Ramsey arrived to visit him on 17 September 1923 to discuss the
Tractatus; he had agreed to write a review of it for
Mind. He reported in a letter home that Wittgenstein was living frugally in one tiny whitewashed room that only had space for a bed, washstand, a small table, and one small hard chair. Ramsey shared an evening meal with him of coarse bread, butter, and cocoa. Wittgenstein's school hours were eight to twelve or one, and he had afternoons free. After Ramsey returned to Cambridge a long campaign began among Wittgenstein's friends to persuade him to return to Cambridge and away from what they saw as a hostile environment for him. He was accepting no help even from his family. Ramsey wrote to John Maynard Keynes: "[Wittgenstein's family] are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid's food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren't on good terms but because he won't have any money he hasn't earned ... It is an awful pity."
Haidbauer incident, Otterthal
He moved schools again in September 1924, this time to Otterthal, near Trattenbach; the socialist headmaster, Josef Putre, was someone Wittgenstein had become friends with while at Trattenbach. While he was there, he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for the children,
Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published in Vienna in 1926 by Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, the only book of his apart from the
Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. A first edition sold in 2005 for £75,000.
He continued to be the object of gossip and mistrust, in part because he was very demanding of the children. The
dénouement came in April 1926 during what became known as
Der Vorfall Haidbauer (the Haidbauer incident). Josef Haidbauer was an 11-year-old pupil whose father had died and whose mother worked as a local maid. He was a slow learner, and one day Wittgenstein hit him two or three times on the head, causing him to collapse. Wittgenstein carried him to the headmaster's office, then quickly left the school, bumping into a parent, Herr Piribauer, on the way out. Piribauer had been sent for by the children when they saw Haidbauer collapse; Wittgenstein had previously pulled Piribauer's daughter, Hermine, so hard by the ears that her ears had bled. Piribauer said that when he met Wittgenstein in the hall that day: "I called him all the names under the sun. I told him he wasn't a teacher, he was an animal-trainer! And that I was going to fetch the police right away!"
Piribauer tried to have Wittgenstein arrested, but the village's police station was empty, and when he tried again the next day he was told Wittgenstein had disappeared. On 28 April 1926, Wittgenstein handed in his resignation to Wilhelm Kundt, a local school inspector, who tried to persuade him to stay, but Wittgenstein was adamant that his days as a schoolteacher were over. Proceedings were initiated in May, and the judge ordered a psychiatric report; in August 1926 a letter to Wittgenstein from a friend, Ludwig Hänsel, indicates that hearings were ongoing, but nothing is known about the case after that. Alexander Waugh writes that Wittgenstein's family and their money may have had a hand in covering things up. Waugh writes that Haidbauer died shortly afterwards of haemophilia; Monk says he died when he was 14 of leukaemia. Ten years later, Wittgenstein appeared without warning at the homes of the families whose children he had hurt saying he wanted to apologize personally. He visited at least four of the children, including Hermine Piribauer, who apparently replied only with a "Ja, ja," though some of the other children were more forgiving.
Haus Wittgenstein
In part to distract him from the Haidbauer incident Wittgenstein's sister Margaret invited him to help with the design of her new townhouse in Vienna's
Kundmanngasse. The architect was Paul Engelmann, someone Wittgenstein had come to know during the war when they'd been in the trenches together. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos: three rectangular blocks. Wittgenstein poured himself into the project for over two years. He focused on the windows, doors, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified, to the point where, as Waugh writes, everyone involved in the project was exhausted. One of the architects, Jacques Groag, wrote in a letter: "I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein." When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so that the room had the exact proportions he wanted.
Waugh writes that Margaret eventually refused to pay for the changes Wittgenstein kept demanding, so he bought himself a lottery ticket in the hope of paying for things that way. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of
The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: "It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor."
The house was finished by December 1928, and the family gathered there that Christmas to celebrate its completion, but it was not greatly admired. Wittgenstein's sister Hermine wrote: "It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods." Paul disliked it, and when Margaret's nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life or health. He nevertheless seemed committed to the idea of becoming an architect: the Vienna City Directory listed him as "Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, occupation: architect" between 1933 and 1938. After the war the house became a barracks and stables for Russian soldiers, and in the 1950s it was sold to a developer. The Vienna Landmark Commission saved it and made it a national monument in 1971, and since1975 it has housed the cultural department of the Bulgarian Embassy.