Ene sentence of Martin Heidegger, which is often quoted in order to defend against the biographical in philosophy, is that Aristotle was born, worked and died – and one can thus go on to his texts. Aristotle was of course an easy example, since his time reliable biographical information has become somewhat richer. After all, we also know quite a bit about Heidegger’s life circumstances, and the knowledge of the love circumstances of the erotically active man will perhaps one day be expanded by a few legacies.
Although this leaves the question of what interest, in particular, relationship and love stories can claim on a philosophical terrain. The obvious answer is probably that once the biographical interest is at work, the question is asked too late. For which Heidegger is not the best example, but the other philosopher of the twentieth century who has achieved eminent effect or at least notoriety far beyond the profession. And precisely because his charisma unfolded beyond academic limitations in the medium of the biographical.
We are of course talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his case, the biographical interest that can hardly be avoided depends on the one hand on the absolutely outstanding curriculum vitae. But this curriculum vitae itself cannot be separated from Wittgenstein’s incessant, probing self-interrogations. Just as these self-questions can hardly be separated from the texts that bear witness to his philosophizing; this separation became increasingly difficult, at least with an editing practice that allowed the notes in notebooks, manuscripts and typescript volumes to be followed in ever greater detail. And in addition to the editions of letters, there was also some biographical information from friends, admirers and acquaintances.
Simultaneously seeking and fearing loneliness
Another exchange of letters has now appeared more than eighty years after Wittgenstein’s death. It is of importance for the insight into the life background of his philosophical work in the last years of his life. Towards the end of 1945, Wittgenstein, who had been teaching in Cambridge for a good year after the war had been interrupted, met the young Ben Richards, who had begun his medical studies there three years earlier, but had also taken excursions to philosophical lectures. A few months later, the thirty-five-year-old son from a London family of doctors appears in the manuscripts, mostly in passages for which Wittgenstein used his method of simple encryption. They show him under the impression, or rather shock, of a violent passion that he is trying to come to terms with.
It was known from Wittgenstein’s letters to third parties and their communications that this was not just a short-lived relationship, but that the relationship lasted for years until Wittgenstein’s death in the spring of 1951. But the letters exchanged between the two, acquired in a first bundle by the Austrian National Library in 1995 after the death of Ben Richards, were not released to the public until 2020, before a second supplementary bundle came to Vienna the following year. Translated into German, they are now available in a dignified annotated edition, about two hundred and fifty letters from Wittgenstein and ninety from Richards, whose replies between the end of 1947, when Wittgenstein resigned his professorship, and mid-1949 are missing; plus some pictures, greeting cards, messages scrawled on slips of paper.
It is not an unknown Wittgenstein that one encounters here. Wittgenstein, who was repeatedly plagued by depression, at the same time seeking and fearing loneliness, confronted with the fatal possibility of his philosophical productivity ebbing away, who at the beginning of 1948 was still wondering whether he would be able to finish his book (i.e. the “Philosophical Investigations”) , but probably gave up this prospect soon after, before almost two years later his cancer was diagnosed, which only temporarily prevented him from working on new manuscripts – he is also known from other letters and testimonies. In the letters to Richards, however, the lover of recent years is added.
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