![]() He gave away his immense fortune to other members of his family and trained to be a teacher in the Austrian countryside. Monk is particularly good at describing how the spiritual turmoil of those years transformed what had started in Wittgenstein as a pure interest in logic (he had shaken off his father’s wish that he take up a technical vocation and gone to Cambridge to become Russell’s protégé) into the postwar Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with its mysterious statements on the self, ethics, and aesthetics.įollowing his new-found religious fervor, Wittgenstein, after time in a prisoner-of-war camp, dedicated himself to an ascetic life of service. God was conscience, Christianity not a matter of doctrine but entirely of practice, of attitude. ![]() By 1916 his reading of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, combined with his background in Schopenhauer and Weininger, had led him to a belief in God and Christianity, if in a typically abstract, almost solipsistic, way. During World War I, Wittgenstein experienced a kind of religious conversion. ![]()
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