The First Wittgenstein Biography and Why It Has Never Been Published
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Christian Erbacher The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published 1. Wittgenstein and Hayek At first sight, the life trajectories of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 –1951) and Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 –1992) show remarkable parallels: both of these Viennese thinkers served in the Austrian army during the First World War; both emigrated to England in the 1930s and became British citizens when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938; both were to become major intellectual figures who transformed their fields of study. A closer look, however, reveals considerable differences in the two men, in their upbringing, their war -experiences and their intellectual careers after the war. Hayek and Wittgenstein were distantly related: Hayek’s great grandfather and Wittgenstein’s grandmother had been siblings, making the two men remote cousins. But in this era, when a family of ten children was not uncommon, this relationship was not especially significant. Hayek and Wittgenstein had met occasionally during vacations or family visits, but there was no real friendship (Hayek 1992: 177). Then, too, although Hayek’s family was quite well off, their way of life could not compare to that of the Wittgensteins, one of the wealthiest families in the Austrian Empire, whose Palais welcomed such guests as Johannes Brahms and Josef Labor. Still, the casual acquaintance between Hayek and Wittgenstein was enough to enable them to recognize one another on the train to the Italian Front in the late summer of 1918, as Hayek remembered: My first recollection goes back to a day on furlough and leave of absence from the front, where on the railway station in Bad Ischl, [Austria], two young ensigns in the artillery in uniform looked at each other and said, »You have a fairly familiar face. « Then we asked each other »Aren’t you a Wittgenstein? « and »Aren’t you a Hayek? « I now know that at this moment returning to the front, he must have had the manuscript of the Tractatus in his rucksack. But I didn’t know it at that time. But many of the mental characteristics of the man were already present as I gathered in this night journey from Bad Ischl to Innsbruck, where the occasion was his contempt for the noisy crowd of returning young officers, half -drunk; a certain contempt for the world. (Hayek 1983: 251) 1 During the train ride the two men conversed, but they did not have intellectual discussions. Hayek knew nothing about Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing before 1 A similar recollection is published in Hayek (1977). 10 Christian Erbacher the publication of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus in 1921 (Hayek 1983: 254). And this fact points to yet another major difference between the two men: when they met in the train compartment, Wittgenstein had already studied logic with Bertrand Russell for years, and had worked at notes that would become the Tractatus ; he had served in the army for four years and seen action on the Eastern Front and had lost beloved friends such as David Pinsent. Hayek, by contrast, had just graduated from secondary school and was recruited only shortly before war’s end. Indeed, although they were only ten years apart, Wittgenstein and Hayek belonged to essentially different generations: the war generation and its aftermath. Hayek’s academic career developed rapidly after the war. In 1921 − the year the Tractatus first appeared − Hayek finished his studies under Friedrich von Wieser, one of the founding fathers of the Austrian school of economics. Wieser introduced Hayek to Ludwig von Mises, who became an intellectual tutor for Hayek. Through Mises’ seminars in Vienna, Hayek became a member of the group of liberalist academics who were intellectually connected to the philosophical movement that would become known as the Vienna Circle. In fact, Ludwig von Mises’s brother Richard is said to have decisively inspired the gatherings that gave rise to the Vienna Circle in the years that followed the First World War (Stadler 1997: 741 – 751; Hayek 1992). Through these academic ties, Hayek entered the milieu in which the Tractatus was already prominently and heatedly discussed. Thus, while Hayek did not meet Wittgenstein in person in the 1920s, he became aware of him as an important and admired intellectual: The author of the Tractatus had become an idol for his teachers and the then leading intellectuals of the Vienna Circle who regarded the book as a miraculously presented foundation of their vision for a sci- entific worldview. Wittgenstein, however, was no longer interested in philosophical discussions or indeed in any academic career. He had completed the Tractatus at the end of the war (McGuinness 1988: 287) and when the book was published three years later, it became famous in the philosophical world. But Wittgenstein thought that he had contributed all he could to philosophy. Like many other war veterans, he attended a teachers’ college in Vienna in 1919. From 1920 onwards, he started working as an elementary schoolteacher in remote villages in Lower Austria – first in Trattenbach, later in Puchberg and, eventually, in Otterthal. Thus, Wittgenstein’s and Hayek’s paths did not cross again for a decade, although both men spent most of their time in Austria. Their lives had taken different directions: Wittgenstein turning his back on the Viennese upper class of the old order and Hayek entering the upcoming academic elite of a new world. After working for Mises for two years, Hayek left Austria to do doctoral studies in New York. There he became acquainted with new statistical methods for empirical research in economics. This made him, on his return to Austria, a most valuable collaborator for Mises, who in early 1927 appointed him the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek was then only 27 years old. He now concentrated on the history of monetary and economic theory and two years .