How Queer Was Ludwig Wittgenstein?

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BidenPresident

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There is only one canonical philosopher of the twentieth century with anything resembling these traits: Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was one of the founders of a tradition—the “analytic”—that has come to dominate academic philosophy in much of the world. But he has not been afforded the cloak of impersonality that shrouds most analytic philosophers.

Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, in that seemingly everybody who met him felt moved to record the encounter. How many people in the history of philosophy are the subject of a two-volume tome of anecdotes? What explains the fascination with the ephemera of one man’s life, including among people who claim that the work was the thing?

read://https_www.newyorker.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2022%2F05%2F16%2Fhow-queer-was-ludwig-wittgenstein
 
BidenPresident said:
There is only one canonical philosopher of the twentieth century with anything resembling these traits: Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was one of the founders of a tradition—the “analytic”—that has come to dominate academic philosophy in much of the world. But he has not been afforded the cloak of impersonality that shrouds most analytic philosophers.

Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, in that seemingly everybody who met him felt moved to record the encounter. How many people in the history of philosophy are the subject of a two-volume tome of anecdotes? What explains the fascination with the ephemera of one man’s life, including among people who claim that the work was the thing?

read://https_www.newyorker.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2022%2F05%2F16%2Fhow-queer-was-ludwig-wittgenstein
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His musics are queer so yes he was queer.
 
It’s hard to know what to make of a book that begins with “The world is everything that is the case” and ends with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The numbering of propositions (from 1 to 7, with innumerable nested propositions—5.251 and so forth), the use of symbols and of a special idiolect, all suggest the kind of work one must be a mathematician to understand. But then we come up against lines—allusive, enigmatic—that would not be out of place in a piece of modernist poetry. A queer book, then, by a queer man.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/16/how-queer-was-ludwig-wittgenstein
 
Wittgenstein wasn't the first to think about this, but he is the most important 20th thinker to make us take stock of what we really know scientifically -->

We can derive and define the equations for physical laws, but we cannot explain what they actually mean.
 
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