Some notes and thoughts concerning Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Monk, Ray. To be honest, I first found Wittgenstein very mysterious and great (part of the reason is his wonderful german name). But now I feel little disappointed. I see more a crazy and strange man rather than a genius. He may be a genius, but if it is because his madness and defect (I know it is wrong to say like this, but I can always have such feelings that some man is “great” just because he is strange or even mad), I don’t think it is a great thing. Also I am always confused about philosopher, they always think themselves have the right to judge everything, it is really ridiculous. So I really hate many of his thoughts concerning language, science and maths.

RELUCTANT PROFESSOR

My part is CHAP 20, the reluctant professor. This chapter contains many things, including WITTGENSTEIN work and life after his return to Cambridge. He gives some lectures and courses about aesthetics, science, religion, mathematics. He also struggles with his love with Francis and experience many guilt after Francis death. It helps to better understand WITTGENSTEIN.

Return to Cambridge

Anschluss( [‘ɑ:nʃ lu:s) is one of the reason WITTGENSTEIN return to Cambridge ([vitɡən’ʃtain]). His attempts to find a niche in life outside academia has been at best inconclusive. His savings, of £300 or £400, would not have lasted a lifetime. Eventually, he would have had to have found some paid employment.
That is, as he had put it to Moore in 1930, he would have had to have found someone who had a use for the sort of goods he produced. And the place where these goods were in most demand was, inevitably, in academic life, and particularly in Cambridge.
So at some time or other he would have applied for a lectureship. However, is that if it had not been for the Anschluss, this would not have been as early as April 1938.
This is not only because Wittgenstein was then not eager to return to teaching, but also because he was worried about his relationship with Francis.

[x] he was deeply concerned about the sensuality that existed between himself and Francis, and anxious whether, on his part at least, such sensual desires were compatible with true love.

Live as Couple

Upon his return he moved into Francis’s lodgings and for over a year they lived as a couple. But by 1939 it had deteriorated, and that for the following two years it was only Francis’s undyingly faithful, perhaps even clinging, love for Wittgenstein that kept it going.
Wittgenstein’s love for Francis didn’t survive the physical closeness that he at once craved and feared.

New Disciples

Wittgenstein found a new generation of disciples.
In order to keep his class down to a size with which he felt comfortable, he did not announce his lectures in the usual way in the Cambridge University Recorder. Some students were asked if they would be interested about the classes. No more than about ten students attended

Unfortunately, one of the fact is that those whom Wittgenstein influenced most strongly, particularly in the 1930s did not enter academic life. So a large and important aspect of Wittgenstein’s influence is not reflected in the large body of academic literature that Wittgenstein’s work has inspired.

During this lecture Wittgenstein told one of the students to stop making notes:

~If you write these spontaneous remarks down, some day someone may publish them as my considered opinions. I don’t want that done. For I am talking now freely as my ideas come.~

Fortunately, this request was ignored, and notes from these lectures have indeed been published.

Aesthetics and Religion

Attach Worship of Science

These lectures are unique among Wittgenstein’s corpus. They are concerned, not with mathematics or philosophy generally, but with aesthetics and religious belief.
What distinguishes these lectures is their tone. Precisely because he was speaking in a spontaneous and unguarded manner
And his target is more about the wretched effect that the worship of science and the scientific method has had upon our whole culture.

He believes that in areas of thought and life, scientific method is not appropriate, and efforts trying to make it so lead to distortion, superficiality and confusion.
Wittgenstein told his audience that what he was doing was ‘persuading people to change their style of thinking’ He said he is really disgusted with worship of science
He gives an example:

~Jeans has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading.3 Take the title … I might say the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.~

Rescue Artistic Appreciation

He was also trying to rescue questions of artistic appreciation from the idea that there could be a kind of science of aesthetics:
He said:

~You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beautiful – almost too ridiculous for words.I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well~.

When asked about his ‘theory’ of deterioration Wittgenstein answered:

~‘Do you think I have a theory? Do you think I’m saying what deterioration is? What I do is describe different things called deterioration~

He said that Appreciation often will not consist in saying anything. Appreciation will be shown

by actions as often as by words
by certain gestures of disgust or satisfaction
by the way we read a work of poetry or play a piece of music
by how often we read or listen to the same piece, and how we do so.
These different forms of appreciation do not have any one thing in common that one can isolate in answer to the question: ‘What is artistic appreciation?’
[x] (They are, rather, linked by a complicated series of ‘family resemblances’. )

So It is impossible to describe what it consists because we would have to describe the whole environment.

Religious Belief

Regarding religious, Wittgenstein did not wish to see God or to find reasons for His existence. He thought that if he could overcome himself – if a day came when his whole nature ‘bowed down in humble resignation in the dust’ – then God would come to him and he would be saved.
But in his lectures on religious belief he concentrates only on the first part of this convictionthe denial of the necessity to have reasons for religious beliefs.
He said:

~‘Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm.’~

This is because they both have encouraged the idea that a philosophical justification for religious beliefs is necessary for those beliefs So Both of them have fallen victim to the idol-worship of the scientific style of thinking. Religious beliefs are not analogous to scientific theories, and should not be accepted or rejected using the same evidential criteria.
Wittgenstein insists that : The kind of experience that can make a man religious, is not at all like the experience of drawing a conclusion from an experiment or from a collection of data.

Pride and Ambivalence

Apologize for Everything

Wittgenstein is determined not to let himself get away with the smallest misbehavior. For example he once wrote a letter to apologize for a very minor mistake:

Dear Mrs Stewart
	I must apologise for an untruth I told you today in Miss Pate’s office. 
	I said that I had seen Mrs Thomson recently in Birmingham; 
	& only when I came home this evening it occurred to me that this wasn’t true at all.
	……
	Please forgive my stupidity. 
								Yours sincerely, L. Wittgenstein

Pride in Work

However, things are very interesting in philosophy work. Though he tried to exclude pride from his work, as he put it, ‘to the glory of God’ rather than out of vanity,
yet we find again and again that ‘pride of Lucifer’ occurs most often in philosophy work.
He said:

~I was obliged to learn that my results variously misunderstood…. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it.~

Become Professor

After G. E. Moore’s resignation, He decided to apply for the post of Professor of Philosoph
The disadvantage is one of the electors Collingwood was disagree with Wittgenstein’s work. The advantage is that among the electors there was John Keynes.
The fact is that, by 1939 he was recognized as the foremost philosophical genius of his time.

~‘To refuse the chair to Wittgenstein’ ‘would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physics.’~ , said C. D. Broad. Broad was not a admirer of Wittgenstein’s work; he was simply stating a fact.

On 11 February Wittgenstein was duly elected professor.

Mathematics

Redescribe Math

After he became a Professor, He decided to rescue math by giving a series of lectures to the subject.

So his aim was to reinterpret mathematics – to redescribe it was not a fascinating world waiting for mathematicians, but a swamp of philosophical confusions.

The mathematician Hilbert had once said: ‘No one is going to turn us out of the paradise which Cantor has created.’
Wittgenstein told his class: ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone out of this paradise’ I would do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise so that you’ll leave of your own accord

The lectures on mathematics is one of Wittgenstein’s general attack on the idol-worship of science. Wittgenstein thought the idolization of science was the most significant symptom and a contributory cause of the decay of our culture.

Argue with Turing

One of the lectures audience was one of the greatest mathematicians of the century: Alan Turing.
The lectures often developed into a dialogue between Wittgenstein and Turing, with the former attacking and the latter defending the importance of mathematical logic.
The presence of Turing is very essential to the theme of the discussion, once when he announced he would not be attending a certain lecture, Wittgenstein told the class that, therefore, that lecture would have to be ‘somewhat parenthetical’

He said he would try again and again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery is actually a mathematical invention. On his view, nothing for the mathematician to discover. A proof in mathematics does not mean the truth of a conclusion but fix the meaning of certain signs.
He thought that mathematical propositions are grammatical.

After some more lectures Turing stopped attending, convinced that if Wittgenstein would not admit a contradiction is a fatal flaw in a system of mathematics, then there could be no common ground between them.
I think it is very brave of Turing to attend the classes as the representative of all that Wittgenstein was attacking, surrounded by Wittgenstein’s students and discussing the issues in a way that was unfamiliar to him.

The Death of Francis

Death of Francis

By the time the second world war broke out, Skinner’s period as an apprentice had come to an end and he returned to Cambridge and he seems to have made an attempt to return to theoretical work
He knew that he was losing Wittgenstein’s love. After his return to Cambridge, he and Wittgenstein lived separately

In 1941 Francis had been taken seriously ill with polio and had been admitted into hospital. On 11 October 1941, Francis died.
Wittgenstein’s initial reaction was one of delicate restraint. In letters to friends telling them of Francis’s death, he managed a tone of quiet dignity. :

~He died without any pain or struggle entirely peacefully. I was with him. I think he has had one of the happiest lives I’ve known anyone to have, & also the most peaceful death.~

By the time of the funeral his restraint had gone. He behaves like a ‘frightened wild animal’ at the ceremony, after the ceremony he refused to go to the house but walked around town.

But Wittgenstein’s guilt over Francis was entirely unconnected with the way in which he had influenced him. It had to do with more internal matters
He wrote:

~In the last 2 years of his life very often loveless and, in my heart, unfaithful to him. If he had not been so boundlessly gentle and true, I would have become totally loveless towards him.~

~Think a great deal about the last time I was with Francis; about my odiousness towards him … I cannot see how I can ever in my life be freed from this guilt~

Solipsism: Philosophy and Love

Compared with other people Wittgenstein love but not get reward, we can see the characteristics of his love: a certain indifference to the feelings of the other person. Neither Pinsent nor Marguerite nor Kirk were in love with him seemed not to affect his love for them. Indeed, it perhaps made his love easier to give, for the relationship could be safe, in the splendid isolation of his own feelings.
So at last there is a very important concept about Wittgenstein’s love and philosophical ideas: solipsism

Most of his later work is to against the philosophical solipsism which once attracted his very much. He characterized his later work as an attempt to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle)
Its parallel is the emotional solipsism. With Francis that isolation was threatened, and, in the face of that threat, Wittgenstein had withdrawn. I think it is the major reason he behaves really badly towards Francis in his last few years and made him so guilty.

So that’s all about Chapter 20, about the life when he returned to Cambridge, his thought towards science, aesthetics, religious, mathematics and love. It shows what a complicated man Wittgenstein was, most importantly, the author gives us the parallel comparison about his love and his work. We can have a better understanding how one man’s characteristics can deeply shape him, especially for such a genius.