Tom Atwell’s Reviews > Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius > Status Update

Despite these self-admonitions, he in fact showed remarkable courage throughout the campaign. (2997)

Like many of his generation (including, for example, some of his contemporaries at Cambridge, such as Rupert Brooke, Frank Bliss and Ferenc Bekassy), Wittgenstein felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. He went to war, one could say, not for the sake of his country, but for the sake of himself. (2266)

His horror of the bourgeois life was based in part on the superficial nature of the relationships it imposed on people, but partly also on the fact that his own nature imposed upon him an almost insufferable conflict when faced with it--the conflict between needing to withstand it, and needing to conform to it. (l. 1911)

Wittgenstein came to think that what he needed was not a diversion, but greater powers of concentration. To this end he was prepared to try anything, even hypnosis, and had himself mesmerized by a Dr Rogers. (l. 1586)

The Russell Wittgenstein met in 1911, then, was far from being the strident rationalist, the offender of the faith, he later became.

Philosophy, one might say, came to him, not he to philosophy.