Going through my pile of New York Review of Books, while travelling, I came across Ray Monk's review of Michael Nedo's Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ein biographisches Album (Munich: C. H. Beck) in the June 6th, 2103 issue. (I couldn't find it online: maybe they have a moving wall.) The book is a collection of photographs and other illustrations attached to quotations from Wittgenstein, the pictures intended to illuminate the words, and vice versa.
Monk is his usual engaging self, but can barely conceal his irritation:
The book is a direct descendant of the 1983 volume Ludwig Wittgenstein—Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, an Italian poet, historian, and all-around intellectual who dies in 2008. Indeed so large is the overlap between the two books (I would say roughly 90 percent . . . ) that it might be more natural to regard this book as merely a second edition . . . except that that is not how it bills itself. The earlier book is not mentioned anywhere on the cover, the title page, or among the bibliographical details of this new volume. . . I never knew, or ever met, Michele Ranchetti, so cannot hazard a guess about what he might have thought of being airbrushed out of his own joint creation in this way . . .
Nedo claims that "Text and images reveal the complex connections between Wittgenstein's life and work and provide an excellent introduction to his thought," a boast that Monk finds "exaggerated, if not completely false."
My name is "L. W." And if someone were to dispute it, I would straightaway make connections with innumerable connections with innumerable things which make it certain.
Monk says, rather generously, that if you already knew the passage from On Certainty, then "seeing them in this context forces one to read them anew." That strikes me as quite unhinged. How can a picture of the baby Ludwig illuminate the adult Ludwig's reflections on scepticism?
Monk is often naïve in this way. He records a composite photograph reproduced in the book, a superimposition of four portraits of Wittgenstein and his three sisters, remarking that one notices the "strange assortment of accessories"
yet the eyes, the nose, and the mouth look like they belong to the same person, enabling one to see directly the very strong family resemblances that existed between these four siblings. The notion of "family resemblance" is crucial to Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
So Monk seems to say here that the biographical background is important to understanding Wittgenstein, and, what is more, that this is illustrated by the family resemblance that LW himself bears to his siblings, as testified to by a superimposition of their photographs.
Is this is profound or silly? You can judge, dear reader. For myself, I loved Monk's biography of Wittgenstein when I read it a couple of decades ago, and found its assertions of biographical philosophy quite moving then, much as I did when I read Toulmin and McGinnis earlier. Now I wonder what I was smoking in those days.
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