Wittgenstein - "Tell them I had a great life" Was he being 'ironic'?

Wittgenstein Photographed by Ben Richards  Wales, 1947
Born	April 26, 1889  Vienna Austria
Died	April 29, 1951 (aged 62)  Cambridge England
Cause of death	Prostate cancer

In 1920 Wittgenstein 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."

As a teacher Wittgenstein 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

Wittgenstein's eldest brother, Hans, may have suffered from autism. Alexander Waugh writes that the boy's first word was "Oedipus". At the age of four, Waugh writes, Hans could identify the 'Doppler effect' in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, and at five started crying "Wrong! Wrong!" when two brass bands in a carnival played the same tune in different keys.

He was hailed as a musical genius, and was probably homosexual; he died in mysterious circumstances in May 1902, when he ran away to America then disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, likely a suicide.

Exactly a year later, aged 22 and studying chemistry at the Berlin Academy, Waugh writes that Rudi (another of Wittgenstein's brothers) walked into a bar on the Brandenburgstrasse, asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich," then mixed himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide, dying in agony. He left several suicide notes, one to his parents that said he was grieving over the death of a friend, and another that referred to his "perverted disposition." It was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that was campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which from 1871 until 1969 forbade homosexual sex. His father forbade the family from ever mentioning his name again

Monk writes that another brother, Kurt, did become a company director briefly, but shot himself on 27 October 1918 at the end of the First World War, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse. According to Gottlieb, Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself."

Paul also considered suicide, as did Ludwig. The latter told a friend David Pinsent that when Bertrand Russell first encouraged him in his philosophy in January 1912, it had ended nine years of loneliness and wanting to die, Bertrand  Russell was so worried about his state of mind that he predicted Wittgenstein would kill himself by February 1914.

Wittgentein wrote on 1 April 1942: "I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless."

Wittgenstien designed a house for his sister in which he took a year to settle on the design of the door handles and which he had the ceiling pulled down and its height changed by 3cm, just as the worksite was being cleaned up. 

You go to philosophy groups and this kind of detail on Wittgenstein's life is met with huge enthusiasm as if such behviour was proof of his greatness. Yet for many such behaviour was no more than proof of  his cognitive dissonance, or more baldly his autism.


The Swedish psychiatrist Christopher Gillberg argues that Wittgenstein showed several features of high-functioning autism; German psychiatrist Sula Wolff suggests he suffered from schizoid personality disorder.

 ^{On his deathbed Wittgenstein exclaimed:
 "Tell them I have had a great life."}